Byron is situated between Milton, whose suffering Satan retained more than a hint of nobility even though God's ways were supposedly justified, and Nietzsche's ubermench who in suffering the laughter of rejection and the pain of alienated righteousness, destroys the old gods and brings in the new. Byron's duality is couched within a will to do and the weakness to do not - always with the hanging question, does either path really matter? This conflict keeps Byron's humanity locked, like Pascal's paradoxical pronouncement, in "a mid-point between nothing and everything." Pope could assert in...