Byron’s poetic endings: The Deformed Transformed, The Vision of Judgment, The Island, and ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’

Byron’s concern with carving out a place in literary history, and what might (or might not) be his ‘epitaph’, takes on particular significance in his late works. This chapter considers the phenomenal range of Byron’s creative output and situates his last works within his oeuvre, exploring how ‘endings’ are (for him) voyages toward new discoveries that also emerge from an imaginative revisiting of previous works. The Deformed Transformed shapes new forms out of Faustian myth and personal biography. The Island mediates between tragic despair and comic optimism in ways that echo Don Juan, and refashions ideas of heroism and love previously explored in the Turkish Tales and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. ‘On This Day’ recalls Byron’s previous lyric works, but also shows new framings of the self – a matter that takes on renewed force in The Vision of Judgment, where Byron casts a comic eye over the agency of poetry itself.