Dark Shadows

“Manfred” by Lord Byron

Byron undertook “Manfred,” his most Gothic work, in late 1816, a few months after the famed ghost-story sessions which provided the initial impetus for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, which some argue is based on Byron’s fragment of a novel, his brief response to the challenge of the ghost-story sessions. Byron also heard Goethe’s Faust about this time, and “Manfred” may also owe something to Matthew Lewis, author of The Monk, who visited Byron a month or two before “Manfred” was begun. The poem was completed in April of 1817 and published in June of that year.