Stephen King credits a poem by Robert Browning as the inspiration behind The Dark Tower series. What is the name of the poem?

Stephen King credits Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” as an inspiration for The Dark Tower series. Browning’s dramatic poem follows a bleak, unnamed knight traveling through a desolate landscape toward a mysterious Dark Tower. Its atmosphere of obsession, danger, exhaustion, and uncertain purpose strongly echoes the journey of King’s gunslinger, Roland Deschain.

Browning wrote the poem in the 1850s, and it was published in his 1855 collection Men and Women. The title comes from a line spoken by Edgar in William Shakespeare’s King Lear, connecting Browning’s work to an older literary and legendary tradition surrounding Roland. The poem’s Dark Tower is never fully explained, which helped give it an especially haunting quality.

King has said he encountered the poem while studying at the University of Maine and later drew on it while developing his fantasy saga. The Dark Tower books also combine influences from J. R. R. Tolkien, Western films—especially Sergio Leone’s—and other fantasy and science-fiction traditions. The poem is sometimes mistyped as “Child Roland,” but Browning’s canonical title uses “Childe.”