ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some insights into the deep structures of Byron's poetic consciousness and to demonstrate their importance for how we think about language and its relation to belief. Roughly speaking, two critical traditions have grown up around the intellectual and spiritual content of Byron's mature writings, one a theoretical project to engage with the a-theoretical poetic inner space of Don Juan, and the other a largely biographical project to distil Byron's beliefs from what appears to be the more straightforwardly polemical writing, chiefly Cain. Despite Byron's insistence that this should not be done, there is a long tradition of taking his drama for a kind of manifesto, dating from the intelligent contemporary reviews of Bishop Reginald Heber and Leigh Hunt, who considered the organising principle of Cain to be Manichaeism and philosophical scepticism respectively. Bayle is a good touchstone for this aspect of Byron's thinking, particularly as it impacted upon Cain.
