A final draft of Childe Harold I–II was handed to John Murray in October 1811, but Byron did not start work on his next significant poem until a year later: an unusual state of affairs for a poet who is a byword for prolificacy. Certainly 1812 was a busy year: Childe Harold was published in March and made Byron famous overnight. On other fronts he was involved with both the House of Lords and his relationship with Lady Caroline Lamb. There was a hiatus at this time, not surprising in an author contemplating the follow-up to a massive success.

There is evidence (CPW III. 479–80) that Byron started work during this period on a verse tale which was later broken into two and completed separately as The Siege of Corinth and Parisina, published in February 1816. Some lines associated with the first poem survive, originally entitled ‘The Stranger’ (CPW III. 356–7). There is evidence, also, of two songs for what Byron called ‘an unfinished Witch drama’ (CPW IV. 463–4), later used in Manfred, published in June 1817. And there is a satire, Waltz, about the dance craze of the Regency. Then, in late 1812, this period of indecision was resolved by a 344-line narrative poem, The Giaour, ‘born, phoenix-like’, as Jerome McGann describes it (CPW III. 414), from the ashes of two other projects. The first was ‘The Monk of Athos’, dating back to early 1811, about ‘The hopeless Exile’s Anguish and Despair’