Discuss how Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan reflect the Romantic characteristic that places emphasis on the value of the unique...

I can give you background on Byron's emphasis on the
individual, which you can apply to the homework (the reading of the two
works):

Both works focus on the Bryonic Hero, which is a
very close persona of Byron.  Here are his qualities:
notorious…condemned…defiant…brooding…melancholic…voracious…unusually handsome, or
inextricably attractive, often to both sexes...wounded or physically, disabled in some
way...moody, mysterious, and/or gloomy...passionate (both in terms of sexuality and deep
emotions generally)...remorse laden (for some unnamed sin, a hidden curse, or
crime)...unrepentant (despite remorse)...persecuted by fate...self-reliant (often
rejecting people on both physical and emotional
levels)

Here's the background: In 1815, a radical
aristocratic poet, Lord Byron, married, had his first child, and published
Hebrew Melodies, a commercial success which included "She walks in
beauty." Like Napoleon, Byron had become a national romantic hero and champion of the
working class [his first speech in the House of Lords was to grant pardon to English
weavers].  In fact, Byron even welcomed Napoleon's Hundred Days rule and said of his
defeat at Waterloo: "I'm damned sorry for it."  That same year also brought defeat for
Byron: the separation of his wife and rumors of "insanity, incest, and sodomy" by
English critics, politicians, and poets alike. In April 1816, Byron exiled himself from
England, later saying to those who opposed Napoleon and
revolution:

O
ye! who teach the ingenious youth of nations, Holland, France, England, Germany or
Spain, I pray ye flog them upon all occasions, It mends their morals, never mind the
pain (Don Juan, Cato
II).

This is
Byron's Weltanschauung,
or cultural view of the world: he sees a world
in which Byron himself was exiled and morose, alienated from wife, child, and
home.

Andrew Rutherford, in his book,
Byron: A Critical Study, indicts Byron for "artistic slight of
hand," saying that Child Harole is a flawed Byronic Hero, but he never admits to his own
faults in his soliloquies. In effect, Byron is "having it both ways": to avoid
criticism. Since he was an artist in exile, since some critics and certainly the public
were more concerned with tabloid than his works, Byron wrote exiled art forms of poetry
and drama that are intentionally ambiguous and equivocal, all without realistic moral
grounds, to spite critics.  So says Rutherford:

readability="14">

All his heroes in the early verse tales had
paradoxical virtues of good and evil, vice and virtue, but their more unpleasant crimes
were never fully presented in the poems, so that the reader--like the author--could
enjoy the romantic villainy without ever facing its real implications. Something of the
same kind happens in Manfred, for the hero's sinful past is emphasised to make him seem
more interesting and awe-inspiring, but the more objectionable qualities (like hypocrisy
or delight in others' pain) are excluded from the actual portrayal of his character, by
an artistic sleight of hand amounting to
dishonesty.