If it was the real-life journalistic quality of Childe Harold that made him famous, and the projection of his hero's personality into the distinctly unreal life of the Turkish Tales that kept him famous, it was to be the inner world of his shorter poems that kept Byron in anthologies and textbooks from Victorian times to the beginning of the 1960s. It is difficult to generalize amidst such a prolific output, but leaving aside the lyrics written before he awoke to find himself famous, it might be reasonable to say that it is the shorter poems, and the poems that draw directly on biographical experience from 1809 to 1816, which first use the alienation found in the longer poems. They are the earliest of Byron's output to analyse its dynamics and what might be called its prognosis. It is in this period that we find some of the best known of Byron's lyrics – ‘She Walks in Beauty’, ‘Sun of the Sleepless’, ‘Stanzas for Music’ – some of the most exposed biographical verse – ‘When We Two Parted’, ‘Fare Thee Well’, ‘Stanzas to [Augusta]’, [Epistle to Augusta] – and some of his most famous shorter works – ‘Prometheus’, ‘Darkness’, The Prisoner of Chillon. This list is as ‘Romantic’ as the most simple definition of the term could wish, but these poems are rarely simply exploitations of a literary repertoire. Rather they begin to explore that repertoire's underlying logic.

All of the poems in the above list deal with what from an enlightenment or a rationalist point of view are negatives – all seem intent on giving value to that which is ‘normally’ negative or indeed in wringing value out of that which is searingly negative. In that sense they are similar to the Byronic-Hero poems of chapter 2. But these poems do not deal only in the sleight of hand of literary or ‘dramatic’ inversion – those techniques examined in chapter 2 which are almost akin to using a photographic negative to obtain a positive print.

‘She Walks in Beauty’ is best known by its first and most ‘Romantic’ stanza.