1. The Aim of This Quest

The journey to Parnassus signifies his quest for an authentic poetry...his journey is prompted by a recognition that he lives at a time when such a poetry has become all but impossible to write...Childe Harold was written at a time when poetry seemed condemned either to be loud or tinkling, either to promulgate shrilly the patriotic fervour of a nation at war or to retreat into a lyric voice fit only for the expression of private sentiment(130).

2. The distinctive nature of Byron's romance

...whereas Scott's notes claim disinterested scholarly Byron's are characteristically partisan and controversial. Childe Harold is best seen as an attempt to rewrite the poetic romance that had become, in Scott's hands, the most powerful literary expression of the unity of Britain in its struggle against Napoleon...The comedy exposes Harold as degenerate representative of the chivalric tradition, and, more significantly, points the absurdity of the attempt by Scott to construe Burke's rhetoric literally, and resurrect the age of chivalry three centuries after the event...it allows the whole poem to bear witness to a fact of modern experience that it is in Scott's interest to deny, the fact of self-consciousness, the existence of a self that cannot be subsumed within  any larger affiliation to a group or to a nation(131-32).

3. ...for McGann, the true subject of the poem is to be found in the 'shifting sensibilities' of the narrator. His ideas as ideas, are 'structly of secondary poetic importance...All that is missing from his accound is a proper sense of the effrentery of a poet who conducts his reader to the Spanish peninsula,...only to insist that these events are of strictly scondary importance relative to his own 'shifting sensibilities'(132).

4. The fact of self-consciousness

Childe Harold with ties misanthropic, self-absorbed hero...is designed as a calculated affront to any demand that the individual surrender to a national 'unanimity', or that the private voice subordinate itself to the voice of 'public feeling'(133).

5. Canto II as a meditation on the imperial ambitions of Britain and of France

Byron's crucial tactic is to place contemporary history within a vast historical panorama. The imperial pretensions of Britain and of France are seen from the perspective of the debilitated fading empire of the Ottomans and the long ago extinguished empire of Athens(136-37).

6. Childe Harold as a Whig poem

Byron's poem frankly displays the humane, intelligent and ultimately incoherent responses to the European situation that Grey despaired of formulating as a policy.  Childe Harold is a Whig poem that recognizes bitterly that Whig principles cannot be coherently applied to the Europe through which Byron conducts his reader, a Whig poem that fails to find a relation between it Whig principles and any possible exercise of real power.

7.Childe Harold as an achievement out of despair

Byron rewrote the romance in a manner that, by removing his readers from the 'crowd' and reminding them that each stands 'alone on earth', bestowed on them once more their own irreducible individuality. It was an achievement born out of despair. A Europe that no longer seemed to admit the possibility of being formed into a confederation of free nations might at least allow the freedom of the individual self(143).