SOURCE: Soderholm, James. “Byron, Nietzsche, and the Mystery of Forgetting.” Clio 23, no. 1 (fall 1993): 51-62.

In the following essay, Soderholm explores the connection between Byron's character Manfred and Nietzsche's Uebermensch, suggesting that Manfred is a hate-poem aimed at several people in England, particularly Byron's wife, Lady Byron, and his sister, Augusta Leigh.

In the Romantic heroic tradition, a strain of rebellion runs from Byron's rogues gallery of Promethean heroes to Nietzsche's Uebermensch. A philosophy of radical individualism, best exampled in the “metaphysical rebel” of Camus, keeps this strain alive in the twentieth century. Bertrand Russell was so impressed with Byron's contribution to this form of titantic self-assertion that he devotes an entire chapter to the Byronic hero in his History of Western Philosophy. And Peter Thorslev, who wrote the book on the Byronic hero, persuasively links the enthusiasms of Sturm und Drang—its Promethean fire—to incarnations of rebellious...