Lord Byron wrote the narrative poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” The poem follows a disillusioned young aristocrat who travels through Europe while reflecting on history, war, nature, and his own dissatisfaction with worldly pleasure.
The first two cantos were published in 1812 after Byron returned from travels through Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and the eastern Mediterranean. They made him famous almost overnight. The later cantos appeared in 1816 and 1818, expanding the poem’s settings to Waterloo, the Rhine, Switzerland, Venice, and Italy.
The title’s “childe” is a medieval term for a young man preparing for knighthood. Harold is fictional, but the poem contains strongly autobiographical elements, which helped create the influential image of the brooding, wandering “Byronic hero.”
A common mix-up is confusing the poem with Byron’s later satire “Don Juan,” which is also lengthy and autobiographical in flavor but uses a very different comic style. “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” is written mainly in Spenserian stanzas and is one of the defining works of English Romanticism.