Childe Harold is a disillusioned knight in training when he decides to leave his life of idle pleasure behind and travel the world, visiting exotic foreign lands in search of new adventures. Lord Byron wrote "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" as a semi-autographical poem, and many of Harold's encounters were taken directly from Byron's experiences travelling Europe and the Middle East. Byron originally felt that the poem was too personal to publish, but eventually sent the first two cantos to print, which quickly propelled him to fame as a poet.
