Short analysis

Byron wrote about Don Juan because he could relate to him, the most handsome man in Spain, quite irresistible to women and, without realizing, a great seducer. Don Juan is an epic, written to debunk the epic style.

At the end of the Julia episode in Canto I, Byron digresses to discuss the nature of this work. «My poem is an epic, and is meant to be», and he lists the familiar hallmarks of the epic. He is partly making fun of the conventional rules of the epic stipulated on Aristotle’s Poetics.

In the poem Byron sets out to debunk the establishments and religion and to expose the hypocritical, social and political cant of the times which make the epic contemporary – debunking society and its moral values. He deals with every aspect of society, sometimes serious, sometimes flippant.

The most important and most original quality in Don Juan is its perpetually shifting mood and tone, its sudden shifts from profundity to frivolity, tenderness to irony, horror to farce, an effect which Hazlitt described as «the utter discontinuity of thoughts and feelings».

The light-heartedness about serious matters and the constant flitting between seriousness and levity annoyed many of his readers. The flippancy about the shipwreck in Canto II, although true since he gathered informationfrom real life experiences, was not appreciated by his readers. His bathos of the shipwreck and the love affair with Haidee annoyed many of his readers. Even Shelley felt that Byron indulged in too much cynicism.

Byron is opposing the Romantic trend of producing emotionally inflated, self-important verse, wishing his poetry to reflect a truth and an objective view of life, and this involved an assault on the «kingdom of cant», the rule of hypocrisy, self-deception, and false sentiment, in private and public life. As he famously said, «It may be profligate … but is it not life, is it not the thing?»

Byron succeeds in capturing the multiplicity of human experience chiefly through digressions. He employs digression not only to vary the mood or speed of the narrative but mainly just for its own sake, partly as a display of virtuosity, partly to establish his new genre of «conversational epic».

The dedication was originally withheld from publication on the insistence of Murray. The running quarrel with Robert Southey for poetical, political, and personal reasons is clearly expressed and Byron finally demolishes him in The Vision of Judgment.

He criticises Southey both as poet laureate and as a member if the Lake School of Poets. He also charges The Lakers with having sacrificed their youthful idealism formaterial rewards and praises Milton, who never forsook his principles. Finally, he turns back to Southey, who applauds these odious policies, and dedicates Don Juan to him in flattering terms.

In Canto I, the poet starts with his search for a hero: «I want a hero» – he finally settles for Don Juan since many contemporary heroes have only momentary fame. He decides to start the epic from the very beginning, contrary to tradition.

In the first few stanzas Byron establishes the half playful and mocking, and half serious tone that pervades Don Juan, a truly representative section of Don Juan which establishes Byron’s unique blend of narrative comment and digression.

Canto I concentrates many of the salient features of the poem within a single episode and sets the pattern for later events. We see Juan in his boyhood sheltered and manipulated by his mother, then in his adolescence seduced by a married woman. Thence in the later cantos he passes from one situation of feminine dominance to another.

The closing stanzas reflect Byron’s change of outlook, which shapes the entire work, a shift from the involvement of Byron’s adventures in Childe Harold to the detachment of Byron as narrator in Don Juan. InDon Juan Byron’s material is often autobiographical; however the new stance is that Byron can now separate his boyish from his adult personality. So the development of Juan’s character is very slight, unlike that of Harold.

http://www.goodessaywords.com/2010/03/don-juan-by-lord-byron.html



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