In his journal of 1821, Byron sets out a problem that concerns the secular, aristocratic condition of ennui :

Ennui, a state of melancholic boredom, is associated with aristocrats and aesthetes, those with time on their hands. Byron, himself an aristocrat and aesthete, had an experimental approach towards the resolution of his condition. He tries temperance and exercise with no success, but he finds that ‘violent passions’ help in combating the condition. Byron, perhaps sadly or most probably wryly, associates his problem with a particular time of the day, ‘waking in low spirits’. His analysis that it is ‘constitutional’ is roughly similar to the Augustinian notion of Original Sin or the now fashionable reference to DNA and genetic inheritance, in that he feels that he was born into his condition and, despite continuous efforts, cannot easily change it. Byron's analysis is not wholly solipsistic but is it, in any way, spiritual? This essay sets out to present a sequence of ideas that locates the secular categories of ennui and melancholy more precisely as the silhouettes of the Greek and Scholastic theological term acedia, which has been loosely translated from the term that describes a spiritual condition of the Desert Fathers, understood as ‘the noonday demon’.

Such an argument is not without precedent. Jerome Mcgann, in his essay ‘Byron's Lyric Poetry’, observes: ‘Romanticism is regularly and usefully characterised in terms lifted from a certain set of adjectives, such as: subjective, impassioned, personal, sincere, spontaneous, reflective, self-conscious.’