The Byron Journal

Abstract

This article explores how Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage stages a process of self-division. Centring on the depiction of Napoleon and Wordsworth as doubles for Byron as poet, it suggests that the poem crafts doubles that deliberately fail to correlate with Byron’s self, consciously undermining an affected movement towards selftranscendence. In doing so it argues for a reassessment of Byron’s use of the figure of the double, proposing that the poem offers ambivalent and fractured doublings inflected by Byron’s desire to present himself as a poet of imaginative mobility, formal ingenuity and intellectual independence.