This chapter argues that the first two cantos of Childe Harold and the Turkish Tales can be read as a sustained critique and questioning of a teleological history, or a history impelled by the acts of great men and heroes. It suggests that these poems engage with the intellectual crisis precipitated by the Napoleonic wars and a devastated Europe in different ways, representing a broad alienation from the meaningful progress of history both within and beyond European borders. Understanding Byron’s distinctive romanticism as primarily political rather than ontological, the chapter reads this group of poems as being charged with a late-enlightenment scepticism representative of a new freedom of thought in which there are no structural possibilities for history, and through which heroic acts are rendered ever more remote from civilisation’s improvement.

As Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I–II (1812) and Eastern Tales (1813–16) steadily gained ascendancy in the field of narrative verse, Walter Scott – hitherto the master of the form – realised the wind was changing. Years later, in the preface to the 1830 edition of Rokeby (1813), he acknowledged that his ‘manner, or style, which, by its novelty, attracted the public in an unusual degree had now […] exhausted the patience of the reader’ and, after Byron’s success, ‘[t]here would have been little wisdom in measuring my force with so formidable an antagonist’.1 With his metrical innovations, ‘licentious combination’ of rhymes, structure and style, historically documented settings and complex characterisations, Scott had made verse tales central to the period’s ‘Metromanie’, John Gibson Lockhart’s neologism for the Romantic-era craze for poetry.2 Taking on Scott’s mantle, Byron modified and revitalised the form; but for all his investment, his attitude towards it was decidedly mixed. It was after reading Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh in 1817 that he formulated his well-known condemnation of the current ‘wrong revolutionary poetical system’, disastrously bent on a collective swerve away from Augustan models (BLJ, V. 265). Besides himself, most of the names guilty of promoting this system were authors of ‘metrical tales’: Scott, Southey, Wordsworth and Campbell (he reprieved Rogers and Crabbe). Three years later, he asked his publisher to spare him from Hemans and George Croly, also narrative poets and published by Murray (BLJ, VII. 201). Even as Byron cultivated and promoted narrative poetry, he denounced it as the expression of a misguided poetic climate, and a derivative, repetitive and faddish form artificially propelled by an insatiable demand for novelty.