"Wędrówki Childe Harolda"
"Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage"

The Poet as a Pilgrim at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

Author(s): Monika Coghen
Subject(s): Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: George Gordon Byron; Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; Pilgrimage; transcendence; Polish romantics
Summary/Abstract: As is generally known, "Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage" played a central part in establishing Byron’s celebrity in post-Napoleonic Europe. The poem with its numerous contradictions and the ambiguous construction of the speaker has enabled the readers to interpret the text according to their own horizons of expectations, and to create their image of the poet. It is no surprise then that it was a particular favourite with the Polish Romantics. This essay takes as its springboard the reception of Childe Harold in Poland. I suggest a reading of the poem with a focus on the concept of “pilgrimage”, as the topos of the pilgrim is central to Polish Romanticism. Although the motif of pilgrimage, present in all the four cantos, can be interpreted in parodistic terms, I believe that it also encourages a reading of Byron’s poem in terms of a quest for transcendence, and as a record of deeply personal search for the meaning of life at the beginning of the 19th century.

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