Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem in four parts. It was published between 1812 and 1818. The first two cantos were a runaway betseller when they were published in 1812 and Byron later wrote, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous”.
The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.