A man leaves everything behind and discovers the one thing he can’t escape is himself.

Byron’s most famous creation — Childe Harold, a young man so disillusioned with pleasure that he wanders Europe looking for something, anything, that still feels real. Beautiful ruins, ancient battlefields, mountains that don’t care who you are. This is the original “running from my problems across an entire continent” poem, and every brooding protagonist who’s ever stared moodily out of a carriage window owes it a debt.

Curated and introduced by G. Ashworth.

He says he wrote this one too young to know how true it would become. He wasn’t lying about that.