Book contents
- Byron’s Don Juan
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Byron’s Don Juan
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 My Poem’s Epic
- Chapter 2 I Want a Hero
- Chapter 3 Especially upon a Printed Page
- Chapter 4 The Gate of Life and Death
- Chapter 5 Allusions Private and Inglorious
- Chapter 6 Taking Another Tack
- Chapter 7 Mine Irregularity of Chime
- Chapter 8 This Is a Liberal Age
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Chapter 1 - My Poem’s Epic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2023
- Byron’s Don Juan
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Byron’s Don Juan
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 My Poem’s Epic
- Chapter 2 I Want a Hero
- Chapter 3 Especially upon a Printed Page
- Chapter 4 The Gate of Life and Death
- Chapter 5 Allusions Private and Inglorious
- Chapter 6 Taking Another Tack
- Chapter 7 Mine Irregularity of Chime
- Chapter 8 This Is a Liberal Age
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Summary
Chapter 1 asks what kind of poem Don Juan is. It asks whether Byron’s claim, ‘my poem’s epic,’ is serious or whether, as he told John Murray, it was a poem written with no intention other than to ‘giggle and make giggle.’It arrives at the conclusion that Byron wrote Don Juan at a time when the epic poem, the poem that truly expressed the spirit of its age, could succeed only if it agreed also to be trivial. The epic poem of the 1820s could only achieve epic status by being, to echo a phrase of Angela Esterhammer’s, profoundly trivial.
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- Byron's Don JuanThe Liberal Epic of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 9 - 35Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023