This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

This chapter discusses Canto III of Childe Harold and Manfred as marking a turning point in Byron’s writing career. Together, these two works detached Byron from the tragic universe of the Tales and pointed him towards the comic world of Don Juan. Childe Harold III turns from exploring the devastating trauma of painful memory – the Byronic Hero’s, the poet’s and post-Napoleonic Europe’s – to a quest for ways of forgetting pain through the imagination and communing with the natural world. Through these it finds a path into renewed, and new forms of, vitality, though these ultimately prove temporary and the return to the memory of pain inevitable. However, Manfred takes up Childe Harold III’s quest to discover the power of memory itself to console, comfort and revitalise. The result is a new, self-conscious, wilful, and appreciative acquiescence in the flow, and contrary flowings, of his own consciousness – indeed, his existence per se – even as he approaches his death. This prepares the way for Don Juan’s wholesale embrace of the spontaneous vitality, but also impermanence, of all human impulse(s) – an embrace that is fundamental to Byron’s comic vision.