Don Juan

Lord Byron's Don Juan is one of the great comic-satirical poems in English: a dazzling mock-epic that turns the famous seducer into a naïve young man repeatedly seduced, endangered, rescued, and swept through the absurd machinery of European society. Begun in 1818, first published in 1819, and left unfinished at Byron's death in 1824, the poem moves through scandal, shipwreck, war, slavery, romance, aristocratic intrigue, and political satire with astonishing verbal speed. Britannica notes that the first two cantos were published in July 1819 and describes the poem as Byron's great satire in the form of a picaresque verse tale. Written in ottava rima, Don Juan is as much about the narrator's intelligence as it is about Juan's adventures. Byron interrupts, digresses, mocks, confesses, quarrels, jokes, philosophises, and attacks cant with an ease that makes the poem feel startlingly modern. The British Library describes Byron's version as a controversial mock-epic treatment of the Don Juan legend, reversing the traditional image of Juan as libertine and making the narrator the poem's real cynical, world-weary presence. For readers of classic poetry, Romantic literature, satire, comic verse, literary scandal, and nineteenth-century English writing, Don Juan remains Byron's most audacious achievement. It is unfinished, unruly, brilliant, improper, worldly, and endlessly quotable: a comic epic that exposes hypocrisy while refusing solemnity, and a major work by one of the defining poets of the Romantic age.