ABSTRACT
Lord Byron entertains and tries to synthesize a number of contradictory ideas about the nature of poetry. The first place where these contradictions are allowed full scope, and indeed almost write the poem, is in cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Byron often used poetry as a kind of cathartic self-therapy, venting not only a boiling imagination, but heated emotions. For instance, The Waltz vented ‘the prudishness of his libertinism’ and the ‘pangs of the lame watcher on the sidelines of London and provincial balls’. The poem’s refusal to fulfil the expectation thus generated articulates Byron’s determination to do something new and different. The poem could pan out into a narrative that follows Harold Bloom’s state as it darkens and his isolation is accentuated by travel. The poem seems to have discovered a kind of stability.
