ABSTRACT
In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron presents the wild as a force more than a place, something like a storm that is often present without its power being perceived. The first half of this chapter brings together natural and cultural processes of wilding and discusses them phenomenologically, as parallel to the processes of earth and world discussed in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Building on Heidegger’s discussion of art’s capacity to “open the world and keep it abidingly in force” (169), the chapter suggests that art wilds as well as worlds. The second half of the chapter turns to Romantic period uses of the term “wild” and Byron’s representation of nature as powerful and changing rather than “beautiful and permanent.” By attending to wilding processes at work in pathless woods, villages, and cities, as well as traditionally sublime mountainscapes, Childe Harold foregrounds the ubiquity of nature’s wilderness-making work. To return to Heidegger’s phrase, it keeps the wilderness “in force.”
