Byron’s Confessional Pilgrimage

For Jerome McGann, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is Byron’s ‘revolutionary confessional poem’. ¹ For Harold Bloom, the third canto especially is ‘in the confessional mode of Rousseau and Wordsworth’. ² Such readings of the poem as secular confession have a long history, going back at least as far as Walter Scott’s claim, in his anonymous 1817 review of Childe Harold III, that there are ‘so many allusions to the author’s personal feelings and private history, that it becomes impossible to divide Lord Byron from his poetry’. ³