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from Richard Cronin, “Mapping Childe Harold I and II”
The journey to Parnassus signifies his quest for an authentic poetry, a poetry that will not ‘shame’ the Muse as have so many ‘later lyres’, and his journey is prompted by a recognition that he lives at a time whensuch a poetry has become all but impossible to write. The apostropheto Mount Parnassus interrupts a tribute to Spanish women, womenwho have abandoned the ‘unstrung guitar’, and chosen to sing instead‘the loud song’ of war. Byron records their dilemma sympathetically, for it is his own dilemma, too. Childe Harold was written at a time when poetry seemed condemned either to be loud or tinkling, either to promulgate shrilly the patriotic fervour of a nation at war or to retreat into a lyric voice fit only for the expression of private sentiment. Byron’s prayer to Parnassus, his prayer that he be allowed to pluck ‘one leaf of Daphne’s deathless plant’, is a plea that somehow he be allowed to escape this dilemma(130).
If Greece remained for Byron ‘haunted, holy ground’ it was in part because it was in Greece that his own political ideal of republican independence had first been embodied, but it was also, and more importantly, because Greece was peculiarly the country of poetry, the land of Parnassus. The ideal of art, unlike the ideal of national independence, might seem immune from the war between Britain and France. Lord Elgin’s function within the poem is to demonstrate that this is not the case. In stripping the Parthenon of its friezes, Elgin offered a lively demonstration that art offers no sanctuary from a world of power. In Greece Elgin did no more than imitate what Napoleon had done in Italy. The Porte in Constantinople was too reliant on the power of British arms to deny Elgin the permission he needed. Elgin’s excuse was that it was necessary to remove the sculptures to preserve them, his motive was that the sculptures might inspire a new school of British art, but he justified his action on the simple ground that if the sculptures had not been seized by him, they would inevitably have been seized by the French. Lord Elgin’s activities, the fact itself that the marbles were transported to Britain by British warships, afforded an ample proof that art could no longer claim to transcend politics in a world in which the work of art had become the most prized trophy of success in war(139).
The reviewers chose to present Childe Harold as characterized by what Jeffrey calls ‘singularity’ and Ellis terms, slightly more astringently, ‘caprice’ rather than by partisanship, and in this they were surely properly responsive to the poem. For Jerome McGann, in the most persuasive account of Childe Harold yet to appear, that ‘singularity’ is the poem’s true subject, for in Childe Harold opinions function only to map a private space. The poem ends when the death of Edleston unites the narrator and his hero in a bitter misanthropy that accepts the public world merely as a contemptible masquerade, of use only to disguise the unbearable tenderness of an inner life given over to the nurturing of a quite private grief. If, as I have argued, the poem is a pilgrimage to Parnassus, a quest for a stance from which the poet can address the public world in a true poem rather than a ‘worthless lay’ or ‘transient song’, then the poem would seem to end in a confession of utter failure(141).
Childe Harold is a Whig poem that recognizes bitterly that Whig principles cannot be coherently applied to the Europe through which Byron conducts his reader, a Whig poem that fails to find a relation between its Whig principles and any possible exercise of real power. Hence the appropriateness of the poem’s hero who travels in a futile attempt to escape himself, and whose travels serve only to confirm him in his own gloom... Childe Harold offered its first readers an opportunity to escape from communal sentiment, it offered release from the patriotic demand that the nation in wartime consent to an impersonal unanimity. In Scott’s hands the romance had become the most powerful expression of the unity of national sentiment. Byron rewrote the romance in a manner that, by removing his readers from the ‘crowd’ and reminding them that each stands ‘alone on earth’, bestowed on them once more their own irreducible individuality. It was an achievement born out of despair. A Europe that no longer seemed to admit the possibility of being formed into a confederation of free nations might at least allow the freedom of the individual self(143).
 
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