Byron’s ‘City of the Soul’: The Roman Underworld in <i>Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage</i>

Byron’s fraught encounter with Rome in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV (1818) provided the optimal occasion for writing in a rhetorical mode that evolved from the Horatian ode but is regularly considered absent from Byron’s practice: the greater Romantic lyric. Although he rarely adopted it in his standalone poems, it often emerges as a discrete sequence when a Roman location provokes an intensely personal response. Recent research, notably Saunders et al. in Romans and Romantics, has established a context for investigating why. Excavation made ancient Rome co-present, an uncanny place affording free slippage among cultural, historical, and psychological spaces. Slippage of mind and place also motivated the greater Romantic lyric, making it a vehicle for coherently accommodating personal and cultural anxieties within a Roman tour narrative. This article shows how four exemplary lyrics trace a katabasis (underworld journey) among the Roman dead: Mount Soracte, Egeria’s grotto, the Colosseum, and the Caritas Romana dungeon whose force generates the pilgrim’s return. Reading Byron's Roman katabasis through the lens of creative illness and poetic innovation illuminates how his negotiation of personal and cultural history prefigures modern narratives of selfhood forged through infernal experience.