“Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” is a lengthy narrative poem written by the English poet Lord Byron, and was published between 1812 and 1818. The poem describes the travels and thoughts of two characters who, disillusioned with a life of idleness and pleasure, seek a new life in foreign lands; altogether, can be interpreted as the expression of the melancholy and disillusionment experienced by a generation exhausted of wars of later age to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.
As Byron himself admitted, the poem takes its inspiration from autobiographical stories by the same author, in particular from the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas made between 1809 and 1811.