In Lord Byron: Life and career …for the Faustian poetic drama Manfred (1817), whose protagonist reflects Byron’s own brooding sense of guilt and the wider frustrations of the Romantic spirit doomed by the reflection that man is “half dust, half deity, alike unfit to sink or soar.” Read More
In Weltschmerz …discontent (especially as shown in Manfred and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage). Weltschmerz was characterized by a nihilistic loathing for the world and a view that was skeptically blasé. In France, where it was called the mal du siècle by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1833, Weltschmerz was expressed by Chateaubriand, Alfred de… Read More
