Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was the poem which brought Lord Byron public recognition. He himself disliked the poem, because he felt it revealed too much of himself. In it a young man (called childe after the medieval term for a candidate for knighthood) travels to distant lands to relieve the boredom and weariness brought on by a life of dissipation. It is thought to be a comment on the post-Revolutionary and -Napoleonic generation, who were weary of war.
