The third canto of Childe Harold and the dramatic poem Manfred mark the high point of Byron's involvement with the Haroldian ‘Byronic’ hero. Both offer an exploration rather than a simple dramatization of the existential problems of individuality. But in Manfred there is an almost systematic analysis and a decisive turn in the thought process, new enough to stand as a marker for a significant shift in Western sensibility (because of this Byron is, for example, the only poet to have a chapter to himself in Russell 's History of Western Philosophy).

From the outset, unlike the previous cantos, Childe Harold III is aware of its own process. The person who has come to understand life, the narrator tells us in stanza 6, knows why we write poetry:

Art is the answer to ennui. The process which had been the vehicle for the melodrama of Cantos I and II becomes the subject of this stanza in III. The created character gives meaning to the futile life of its author. This is a significant moment – it can usefully be contrasted to the thought of the draft version of ‘Sun of the Sleepless’ entitled ‘Harmodia’ and discussed above in chapter 4. There, art was invariably a diminished copy of life, since expression was always merely a defective copy of the real thing. But here expression is true creation, adding value to a life which is intrinsically worthless. Moreover, when published, the wider resonance of ‘Sun of the Sleepless’ was unexplored, since the self-conscious exploration of its theme was excised from the lyric. But in this stanza Byron has no such qualms. It is now perfectly reasonable to discuss in a poem the psychology of writing the poem. There is thus both an increase in selfawareness and an increase in the value of self-awareness – to be self-aware is not only a burden, but a way to the lightening of the burden.