Epic and National Liberation in Romantic Poetry A Comparative Study of Petar II Petrović‑Njegoš and Lord Byron

This paper conducts a parallel comparative study of two foundational poets of European Romanticism: Petar II Petrović‑Njegoš (1813–1851), the Prince‑Bishop of Montenegro and author of the national epicThe Mountain Wreath, and Lord Byron (1788–1824), the canonical British Romantic poet whose works shaped the literary imagination of a continent. Despite their geographic, cultural and linguistic distance, both poets produced epic poetry that engaged profoundly with the question of national liberation—Njegoš from the perspective of a small Orthodox Christian polity struggling for survival against Ottoman expansion, Byron from the vantage of a global empire whose liberal ideals inspired revolutionary movements across Europe. The study examines their works across four dimensions: historical and cultural contexts of poetic production; narrative strategies in the construction of national‑emancipatory themes; deployment of religious and symbolic imagery; and Romantic aesthetic and stylistic features. The research demonstrates that both poets share a fundamental commitment to freedom as the highest human good, but express this commitment in fundamentally different ways: Njegoš through a collective, national, religious epic that serves the existential interests of his people; Byron through an individual, cosmopolitan, secular poetry that advocates universal liberal values. The study fills a notable gap in mainstream comparative scholarship: no dedicated, sustained side‑by‑side comparative analysis of Njegoš and Byron has yet been formally published in international academic circles. By establishing this parallel, the paper consolidates the canonical status of Montenegrin national epic within the global nineteenth‑century Romantic poetic system and provides a foundation for subsequent cross‑Balkan‑British comparative research.