Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
A young nobleman travels through Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy, and reflects on empire, freedom and his own unhappiness. Byron published the first two cantos in 1812 and woke up famous; the later cantos were written after he had actually seen the places he was describing.
The Spenserian stanza gives the poem its slow, propulsive music, and the fourth canto, set in Italy, is the finest. Byron's melancholy is easy to mock, but the political passages about Greece and Rome are sharp, and his description of the battlefield at Waterloo is one of the first great anti-war passages in English poetry.
Public-domain status
First published in 1812. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Lord Byron died in 1824, so this work has been free to republish there since 1895.
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