Noble and wealthy, he embodied the figure of the “dandy” then in vogue. His adventurous itinerary across all Europe was transfigured in his imagination, and the result was Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–16–18), which essentially became a pictorial diary dominated by the dark and scornful figure of his hero, Harold, “a weak son of doubt and death, who places his hope only on fragile reeds” (Childe Harold’s Pilgr., II, st. 3).
This same hero reappeared in his verse tales (1813–16): The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The Siege of Corinth, Parisina. Of 1817 was Manfred, a mirror of one of his turbid passions; and of 1821 the apocalyptic Cain, published during his stay in Italy, along with three other dramas: Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari. A rebel against a punishment he did not feel was his own, Cain, having abandoned God, turns to Lucifer in the vain hope of finding in him an answer to his anguished questions; and when he sees Abel ever more bound to that God whom he hates, he kills him and, in despair, flees into exile. The work bears the imprint of the old myth of the god of evil.
In 1819 he began publishing his masterpiece, Don Juan, an epic satire. In this poem, where comedy, tragedy, voluptuousness, and cynicism alternate, the adventures of the protagonist are recounted in Spain, Greece, Russia, and finally his transfer to England, through whom the poet satirizes the customs and society of the time.
Rebellious to every morality, every law or social convention, yet incapable of proposing new values, Byron made of his existence a rebellion unto itself, marked by the need for fatality.
It is true that in moments of inner concentration Byron felt the charm of Christ and the need to believe (Don Juan, c. XV, st. 18). Then his hand knew how to trace, in Parisina, the sublime scene of the priest absolving Ugo in his death throes and restoring calm to him, and in Don Juan (c. XV) the purest profile of a Catholic virgin; just as he succeeded in evoking, in the same poem (III, st. 101–103), the mystical suggestiveness of the Ave Maria, later echoed by Carducci. But these are solitary passages; nor can his declared “propensity toward Catholic doctrine” (Th. Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of his Life, 2 vols., New York 1830, letters 283, 482) be regarded as anything more than a momentary aesthetic stance.