BYRON:BYRONIC HERO
OPERA:CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE…ESTRATTO:ONCE MORE UPON THE WATERS FINO AL41(WHICH HE FORBORE TO CHECK)…

George Gordon Byron was a British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe. Renowned as the “gloomy egoist” of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) in the 19th century, he is now more generally esteemed for the satiric realism of Don Juan (1819–24).
With his life and his works he made popular the “Byronic hero”, a passionate moody and mysterious man who suffers from an unnamed crime hidden in his past. He is characterized by proud individualism, rejects the conventional morality and has a distaste for social institutions and norms. The Byronic hero is an outsider, of noble birth, with a great sensibility to nature and beauty and with a strong power of seduction; women cannot resist him and men either admire or envy him. These different elements of suffering, rebelliousness and eroticism were irresistible in Byron’s age.
The Byronic hero first appears in Byron's semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818).
This poem, made up of four Cantos independent in content and structure, deals with the travels of the young nobleman Harold who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands; in a wider sense it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term “childe”, a medieval title for a young man who is a candidate for knighthood.
The figure of the protagonist is not the main focus of Byron’s attention, he rather uses it to give unity to the different episodes of the narrative and the Pilgrimage across Europe provides the poet with the chance to introduce picturesque and exotic settings.
Especially the fourth Canto, which is set in Italy, contains several descriptions