This volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive selection of Byron’s poetry and prose. It includes eighteen of his lyrics; Cantos One, Three, and excerpts from Canto Four of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; two verse romances, The Prisoner of Chillon and The Giaour, the latter newly receiving critical attention for its prophetically disjunctive structure; Manfred; The Vision of Judgment; and Don Juan, presented in long self-contained extracts—the First, Fifth, Ninth, and Sixteenth Cantos complete, with the close of the Second Canto. An unusually rich selection from Byron’s letters and journals accompanies the poems.

This volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive selection of Byron’s poetry and prose. It includes eighteen of his lyrics; Cantos One, Three, and excerpts from Canto Four of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; two verse romances, The Prisoner of Chillon and The Giaour, the latter newly receiving critical attention for its prophetically disjunctive structure; Manfred; The Vision of Judgment; and Don Juan, presented in long self-contained extracts—the First, Fifth, Ninth, and Sixteenth Cantos complete, with the close of the Second Canto. An unusually rich selection from Byron’s letters and journals accompanies the poems.

The critical essays offer an integrated view of Byron’s achievement as well as analyses of its different facets. Published for the first time is Bergen Evans’s general essay "Lord Byron’s Pilgrimage"; other essays are by John D. Jump, Michael G. Cooke, Francis Berry, Robert F. Gleckner, James R. Thompson, Frank D. McConnell, Leslie A. Marchand, and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

A special section, "Images of Byron," presents 26 views of Byron as artist and as the epitome of the Romantic hero, ranging from the perspectives of his contemporaries to those of such modern writers as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Albert Camus.

A Chronology sets forth the main events of Byron’s life, and a Selected Bibliography lists sources for further study.

The Texts of the Poems

　A Note on the Texts

From Hours of Idleness (1807)

　To M.S.G.

　To a Beautiful Quaker

　To a Lady Who Presented to the Author a Lock of Hair Braided with His Own, and Appointed at a 　Night in December to Meet Him in the Garden

　On a Distant View of the Village and School of Harrow on the Hill, 1806

　I Would I Were a Careless Child

　To Edward Noel Long, Esq.

From Hebrew Melodies (1815)

　She Walks in Beauty

　The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept

　My Soul Is Dark

　The Destruction of Sennacherib

Other Lyrics

　Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos

　To Thyrza

　Epistle to Augusta

　Darkness

　So We’ll Go No More A-Roving

　Versicles

　On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Six Year

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

　Canto the First (1812)

　Canto the Third (1816)

　Canto the Fourth (verses 1-10, 164-86) (1818)

　The Giaour (1812)

　The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)

　Manfred (1817)

　The Vision of Judgment (1822)

　Don Juan (1819–24)

　Fragment on the Back of the Ms. of Canto the First

　Dedication

　Canto the First

　Canto the Second (verses CXLI-CCXVI)

　Canto the Fifth

　Canto the Ninth

　Canto the Sixteenth

Byron’s Letter and Journals

　To His Mother, May 1, 1803

　To Francis Hodgson, November 3, 1808

　To William Harness, March 18, 1809

　To Henry Drury, May 3, 1810

　To Francis Hodgson, September 3, 1811

　To John Murray, September 5, 1811

　To Lady Caroline Lamb, May 1, 1812

　From His Journal, November 1813–April 1814

　To Lady Melbourne, January 7, 1815

　To Lady Byron, February 8, 1816

　To John Murray, September 15, 1817

　To Thomas Moore, February 2, 1818

　To John Cam Hobhouse and the Honorable Douglas Kinnaird, January 19, 1819

　To the Honorable Douglas Kinnaird, October 26, 1819

　From His "Detached Thoughts," October 1821 to May 1822

　To the Honorable Augusta Leigh, September 12, 1823

　To Mr. Mayer, English Consul at Prevesa, undated

Criticism

　Bergen Evans, Lord Byron’s Pilgrimage

　John D. Jump, Byron: The Historical Context

　Michael G. Cooke, Byron and the Romantic Lyric

　Francis Berry, The Poet of Childe Harold

　Robert F. Gleckner, The Giaour as Experimental Narrative

　James R. Thompson, Byron’s Plays and Don Juan

　Frank D. McConnell, Byron as Antipoet

　Leslie A. Marchand, Byron in the Twentieth Century

　E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Byron and the Terrestrial Paradise

Images of Byron

　Francis Jeffrey, From the Edinburgh Review (April 1814)

　Lady Caroline Lamb, From Glenarvon (1816)

　Thomas Love Peacock, From Nightmare Abbey (1818)

　Ro　bert Southey, From A Vision of Judgment (1821)

　Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, From Conversations with Eckermann (1822–1832)

　Stendhal, Memories of Lord Byron (1829)

　Thomas Carlyle, From Sartor Resartus (1838)

　Gustave Flaubert, From His Letters (1838 and 1845)

　Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoughts on Modern Literature (1840)

　Harriet Beecher Stowe, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850)

　Matthew Arnold, [Byron] (1881)

　Oscar Wilde, From The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

　George Bernard Shaw, Dedicatory Letter to Man and Superman (1903)

　James Joyce From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

　Virginia Woolf, From A Writer’s Diary (Wednesday, August 7, 1918)

　William Butler Yeats, From A Vision (1922)

　T.E. Lawrence, From Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)

　Charles Du Bos, Byron and the Need of Fatality (1931)

　Mario Praz, From The Romantic Agony (1933)

　T.S. Eliot, Byron (1937)

　Albert Camus, From The Rebel (1951)

　Vladimir Nabakov, From Lolita (1955)

　W.H. Auden, Byron: The Making of a Comic Poet (1966)

　Angus Wilson, Evil in the English Novel (1967)

　Anthony Lewis, At Last Lord Byron Gets Place in Poet’s Corner in Westminster (1968)

　Chronology

Selected Bibliography