This chapter covers major late period works, which are in many ways increasingly more twenty-first century rather than eighteenth or nineteenth century: full of contradictions and energy.

It was a cliché of early and mid-twentieth-century criticism to see Byron's late ottava rima poems as leaving the Romantic in a turn backwards to the Neoclassicism and mock-heroic of Pope. Later descriptions, including my own, preferred to characterise the shift as a forward step into the instability of Romantic Irony and the world of Sterne, Clough, Melville and Joyce. In this essay, born from, and retaining something of the informality of, a lecture – and probably my valedictory wave to the poem, at least in print – I am not concerned with the taxonomy per se, but in its use heuristically. I will argue that a better way of accounting for the experience of reading Don Juan (1819–24) is to think of an inconstant fluctuation between satire assuming a stable world view (looking towards Pope), and irony that dissolves any such possibility of stability, further troubled by a nostalgia for a something more transcendent (looking towards the Romantic), and almost its exact opposite, an insistent blockish physicality. Another way of putting that is to say that the unstable ironic world, created with immersion and gusto, includes nevertheless a nostalgia for a stable world either Classically civilised or Romantically transcendent – but that is not quite accurate, for inside the experience it is not nostalgia but reality. Is a better characterisation a sense of the elegiac – not nostalgia for time past, but the awareness of our human time passing against the solidity of the material, yet without devaluing the present or the evanescent emotion? The three central female figures of the English Cantos are taken as a key part of this shadow-play.

That meaning for Byron at least in his later years resides not in nature but in art, not in an objective world but in a world created by ourselves, is most pointedly expressed in the letters of the Bowles controversy, and is thus often linked with his admiration for Pope and with satire. But aside from his typical energy in the Bowles letters we must distinguish his more extreme view of the artificial from Pope’s. From Manfred onwards, it is art – ‘stories’ in the sense of Beppo's (1818) concluding stanza – that gives life value.

Byron hated an author who was 'all author' and he himself was anything but that. He has been a public figure whose private life has been the subject of intense interest since the publication of Childe Harold Cantos i and ii made him 'famous overnight'. He continues to be the subject not only of scholarly biographical interest but of popular films and television documentaries. To politicians, his political views remain of intense interest, while his sexual mores not only continue to be analysed but have been appropriated by various interest groups to serve their own ends. He is a cultural villain, an anti-hero, and a hero pure and simple. He has the status of a national hero in Greece because of his participation in the Greek War of Independence, and he is also a cultural hero in places as far apart as Russia and Japan. So we have sought in this Companion to place him first of all in the context of the narratives surrounding his own life, and then in the particular circumstances of that life, picking out three obvious areas of particular interest - his relationship to the world of books, to politics, and to sexuality. Only then have we attempted a closer focus on some of Byron's major works. In an output as large as that of Byron his poetical works alone fill some seven volumes. We do not attempt to be comprehensive in this section, but many texts not picked up here are referred to in the other two sections of the volume. Once some familiarity with the issues of the works, including Byron's very considerable contribution to English prose, has been achieved, we have moved on to broader literary and cultural contexts and focused there on Byron's ambivalent relationship to Shakespeare, his massive impact on European literature, and the strange way in which he can be seen in the light either of his attachment to the socially centred poetry of the eighteenth century, or of his prefiguring of postmodernism.

Whereas Childe Harold ii and ii sought the goal of their pilgrimage in the classical world of Greece, at the boundary of civilization and Nature, and Canto iii seeks its elusive goal in Nature beyond civilization, Canto iV concentrates on the high civilization of the Renaissance and of Rome. While obviously to some extent dictated by Byron's own whereabouts, the move also expresses a very significant shift in his world view. In Manfred (pp. 118) we have seen how the individual becomes responsible for the meaning of his or her own life. This is a secular view of meaning, seeing life as a construct of man's own mental activity. This mental activity is represented in and by civilization and culture. Life made meaningful has the form of an artwork - it is a product of civilization and culture. This is the view that dominates Canto iV. The canto opens with the famous image of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice: