ABSTRACT
For Jerome McGann, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is Byron's revolutionary confessional poem. The application of the term 'confessional' to Childe Harold by McGann and Bloom, however, is also part of a much wider reading of Romanticism that sees it as defined by the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking. Drawing on Abrams's reading of Romanticism, as well as Thomas McFarland's suggestion that Rousseau's Confessions is the inaugurating text of Romanticism. That Romantic confessional writing is the heritage of Rousseau', Susan Levin's recent study of this literary confessional tradition describes it as characterised by the appropriation of a religious tradition for use in a non-religious way'. The poem's confessional mode points not only to an attempt to set out a personal identity', as Levin puts it, but also to a yearning for the Divine' and will to believe' in that divinity.
