Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Old English poetry
- 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
- 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
- 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
- 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
- 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
- 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
- 8 Spenser
- 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
- 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
- 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
- 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
- 13 Milton’s shorter poems
- 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
- 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
- 16 Dryden: major poems
- 17 Swift
- 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
- 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
- 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
- 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
- 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
- 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
- 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
- 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
- 27 Byron’s Don Juan
- 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
- 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
- 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
- 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
- 32 Tennyson
- 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
- 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
- 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
- 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
- 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
- 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
- 40 Hardy and Mew
- 41 Yeats
- 42 Imagism
- 43 T. S. Eliot
- 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
- 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
- 46 Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s
- 47 Larkin and the Movement
- 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
- 49 Hughes and Heaney
- 50 Hill
- 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
- 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
- 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
27 - Byron’s Don Juan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Old English poetry
- 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
- 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
- 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
- 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
- 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
- 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
- 8 Spenser
- 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
- 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
- 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
- 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
- 13 Milton’s shorter poems
- 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
- 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
- 16 Dryden: major poems
- 17 Swift
- 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
- 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
- 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
- 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
- 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
- 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
- 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
- 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
- 27 Byron’s Don Juan
- 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
- 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
- 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
- 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
- 32 Tennyson
- 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
- 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
- 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
- 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
- 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
- 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
- 40 Hardy and Mew
- 41 Yeats
- 42 Imagism
- 43 T. S. Eliot
- 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
- 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
- 46 Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s
- 47 Larkin and the Movement
- 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
- 49 Hughes and Heaney
- 50 Hill
- 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
- 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
- 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Byron’s Don Juan begins with disarming directness: ‘I want a hero’ (1.1) and, a few lines later, names this hero as ‘our ancient friend Don Juan’ (1.1). Such a Chaucerian opening is unlike that of any of the great Romantic long poems and, critically, it has never sat easily alongside them.
Don Juan is direct and it does disarm but it relies on multiple indirectnesses to achieve this sustained candour. The relation between directness and indirectness, and between declared improvisation and declared planning, forms the art and life of the poem. In its first published version, the briefest of epigraphical overtures tells us that the poem takes such relationships as its Horatian foundation: ‘difficile est proprie communia dicere’, which Byron himself translated as ‘’tis no slight task to write on common things.’
That is not how the present reader encounters the poem. Depending on the edition, we will find a series of competing overtures before we reach the main text. Some of these were withdrawn by Byron with or against his better judgment; one was unwittingly omitted. Taken together, they invite the reader to make certain helpful presumptions both in what they say, and in the reasons for their omission. We can begin with them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of English Poetry , pp. 506 - 523Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
References
(ed.), English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).Google Scholar
, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, III.7, in Collected Longer Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1968).Google Scholar
, The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage iv, Don Juan and Beppo’, in (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
, Byron’s Don Juan and Eighteenth-Century Literature (London: Associated University Presses, 1975).Google Scholar
, ed. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols. (Tokyo: Yushodo, 1967), vol.xi, pp. 176–7.
ed. ‘In his suite he shall have a girl whom he shall have rescued during one of his northern campaigns, who shall be in love with him, and he not with her.’ Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).CrossRef
, ed. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 13 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973–94), vol. vi.
and , ed. ‘Hints from Horace’ (1821) in Lord Byron. The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), vol. I.
ed. ‘I take him on his strong ground – as an Ethical poet…the latter is the highest of all poetry.’ Letter to John Murray Esq., in Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
and ed. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (London: Norton, 1977).
and ed. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).