'I Have Thought / Too Long and Darkly': Writing and Reading Modes of Being in Byron

Byron's treatment of subjective modes of being are characterised by a poetic mobility that permits competing and contradictory perspectives of the self to coalesce. Starting with Michael O'Neill's sense of fixity and fluidity as a marker of Byronic identity, this article examines Byron's darker poetics of madness that permit a glimpse into the destructive and transformative elements of selfhood. In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Beppo, Venice emerges as the imaginative site of Byron's self-aware artistry and psychodrama of self. Elsewhere Byron's poetics of selfhood are read as inextricably bound to deliberate selfconscious acts of writing and reading that both dread and delight in the fictionality of self, memory, and history.