Lord Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - Paperback

by J. M. Beach (Introduction by), George Gordon Lord Byron (Author)

Byron is situated between Milton, whose suffering Satan retained more than a hint of nobility even though God's ways were supposedly justified, and Nietzsche's ubermench who in suffering the laughter of rejection and the pain of alienated righteousness, destroys the old gods and brings in the new. Byron's duality is couched within a will to do and the weakness to do not - always with the hanging question, does either path really matter? This conflict keeps Byron's humanity locked, like Pascal's paradoxical pronouncement, in "a mid-point between nothing and everything." Pope could assert in the 18th century that "Man was created half to rise and half to fall," while Byron had to struggle with if humanity was created at all, and by whom, and for what purpose? The most distilled revelation of this conflicted search for meaning within, and behind, the human condition comes in Byron's confessional narrative Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1819). In this aspiring epic, Byron presents the Visionary's "compulsive search for an ideal and a perfection that do es] not exist in the world of reality...the unquenchable thirst for ideality and the dissatisfaction with reality."

Author Biography

J. M. Beach is a lecturer at the University of Texas, San Antonio. He has advanced degrees in English, History, Philosophy, and Education. He has been a teacher and educational administrator for over fifteen years. Beach has taught many subjects in the Humanities to a broad range of students, from pre-school all the way to university, in public and private schools, in the U.S., South Korea, and China. Previously Beach was a Lecturer at Oregon State University, the University of California, Jinan University in Guangzhou, China, and at several community colleges in Southern California and Central Texas. Beach's scholarly research focuses on several distinct, but interrelated subjects: The philosophy of knowledge, the science of culture and social institutions, the history and philosophy of education, and literature. Beach is also a published poet. Links to his books, articles, and conference papers can be found at his website at www.jmbeach.com. Follow his blogs at jmbeach.blogspot.com and 21stcenturycanon.blogspot.com