1. Jean Hall, "The Evolution of the Surface Self: Byron's Poetic Career" Keats-Shelley Journal 36(1987), 134-157.

The Prelude is the autobiography of a man who examines his past in search of an inner self that is latent there and needs to be brought into present awareness....In contrast, Byron's poem of surface denies all claims to unity and focus. The author of Don Juan gives up the attempts to make complete sense of his experience....So Byron manages to write and autobiographical poem that is the polar opposite of The Prelude: instead of going into himself, he turns himself inside out and becomes the world(148)

2. Jerome McGann, "The Book of Byron and The Book of a World" from The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory(Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985)

Thus, in Childe Harold(1812) Byron enlarged his personal myth, which he had already begun to develop in his earlier books, by inserting it into the wider context of the European political theatre as it appeared to him in 1802-12; and the central ideological focus of the entire myth involves the question of personal and political freedom in the oppressive and contradictory circumstances which Byron observed in the world of his experience. More than anything else this book says that the most personal and intimate aspects of an individual's life are closely involved with, and affected by, the social and political context in which the individual is placed. Byron goes further to say that such a context is more complex and extensive than one ordinarily thinks, that each person is more deeply affected by (as it were) invisible people, places, and events than we customarily imagine.

3. Philip W. Martin, "Heroism & history: Childe Harold I & II, the Tales" from The Cambridge Companion to Byron(Cambridge UP, 2004)

Childe Harold is a rhetorical tour de force, in which the artistry of declamation assumes primacy. While the poem develops a meditative dimension, its style of thinking is a long way from the ruminative introversion of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Byron's interest in contemplation is not that it might lead to some inner wisdom, vision or higher morality greater than those inhabiting the common frames of thought: it is vitally concerned with the position of the individual in the world...Where the early Romantics' poetry constructed for itself a domestic landscape, in which the home figured large, Byron's poem announced an utterly different location and stimulation for the poet's ideas, in which the settled traditions of domesticity figured not at all.