ABSTRACT
The Wordsworthianism of Childe Harold III does creep into Manfred, but, as Corbett has it, Manfred is a ‘tragic reversal of Wordsworth’, and in it we see Lord Byron finally and decisively ‘rejecting the Wordsworthian and Shelleyian notions of Childe Harold, Canto III’. The play dramatizes the final passing away of Byron’s interest in Wordsworth’s poetry as a possible model for his own. In the first place, Byron experimented in order to open up possibilities but ensured that his experimentation with new models of procedure never became an unmodified imitation of those models. In Manfred, Byron returns to the Byronic hero and his own depictions of him, but he also looks to a host of other writings for new ways of situating, imaging, and imagining the plight of his hero. ‘Evil’, in other words, is confronted with Prometheus, and for Byron, as the final act demonstrates, ‘Evil’ meets its match in this confrontation.
