Don Juan

This was tremendous fun to read. Byron's personality infuses the work and he's a likable, open-hearted narrator. It's a picture of England just before the clouds of Victorian prudery turned love from a game to a chore. It also has a strong anti-war subtext that I wasn't expecting. A great read and a real surprise!

For a long time, I somehow placed Byron into that terrible category of "people you read about" - I don't know why, because every time I've looked up quotations from Don Juan I've felt that this is a poem I should read. Probably needless to say that I couldn't tear myself away from it once I did finally get around to reading it, and read the whole thing in one weekend.

There's a story, of sorts, although that gets pushed further and further into the background as we go on; there's sex and violence; there are all your favourite holiday destinations (Spain, Greece, Turkey, English country houses); there are the wonderfully cutting asides about fellow-poets and contemporary politics; there are gloriously random discussions of whatever show more happens to come into the poet's head.

It's all wonderful, but what really makes it work is Byron's amazingly light touch with verse. The ottava rima form ought by rights to sound forced and mechanical in English, and it probably would in anyone else's hands, but Byron seems to be able to make it read as naturally as everyday conversation. Of course, he has to cheat like anything to achieve this, but he knows exactly how far he can bend the rules before the whole thing breaks down, and always draws back just in time. He seems to take great pleasure in pretending to paint himself into a corner and then producing a ludicrously inappropriate or impossible rhyme ("Aristotle/bottle", "Corydon/horrid one", "excel/well/indispensable"). Even a master of atrocious rhymes like W.S. Gilbert ("Plato/potato") couldn't have done any better - in fact, Gilbert clearly lifted a few useful examples direct from Don Juan, e.g. the "monotony/got any" in Iolanthe. And there are some wonderful bits of bathos, like "...that all-softening, overpowering knell, / The tocsin of the soul—the dinner-bell" and some dreadfully barbed jokes "...angling, too, that solitary vice, / Whatever Izaak Walton sings or says". What more could you want? show less

Bloody great book. I think a lot of people don't realize that as a poet/writer Byron was in a sense closer to 18th century satirists like, say, Swift than he was to his Romantic so-called cohorts ... and yet he's often considered some kind of "arch"-Romantic. Naah. His great talent, I'd say, was a comic one, and it's in Don Juan -- even unfinished as it is -- that this comic genius burns most brightly. It isn't just the funny-as-hell "Hudibrastic" rhymes he often employs, it's ... oh, hell, he was just such a funny damned bastard. Mean, spiteful, but funny.

"Try and find something in here I haven't put my penis in. It's not easy!"


Screw (not all the time, but at this moment I am lionizing Byron, so screw) all the other Romantics with their philosophies and sensibilities. Byron is not even a poet in the hyperdense, words-on-paper-privileging sense that we are used to these days--he's a raconteur, and as such his poetry is a lot more capacious, more flowy, more conducive to being read out loud, more expressive of the medium's oral, social past. "Wedlock and padlock". Keats killed by one review. English ennui. He's not only a raconteur, he's full to bursting of upper-class bons mots. And in that sense, we get the cute reversal of Don Juan the ingenue, not lusting but being lusted, but we also show more get Byron playing the traditional Don Juan role, rolling and rocking and rollicking the story out with a leer. Putting his penis in it, shall we say. And think about how fast that changed from, say, Mozart's Don Giovanni, the degenerate genius of Joseph II's court rolling out a demonic hubris play. In that sense, Don Juan is Exhibit A for the case of Byron as the first modern.


(Penis!) show less

It's been said (I can't remember by whom) that a great book should be read once in youth, once in middle age, and once in old age, just as a great building should viewed at dawn, in daylight, and at dusk.

I first read Byron's Don Juan when I was 25 years old. It was a Penguin edition, and I remember being very swept away by Byron's sexually-charged romance. I had always thought of 19th century poets as being very, well, Victorian. "We shall talk about love but it must be chaste, innocent love. No sex please; we're Victorian". Byron had no such prudish streak. Don Juan is filled with passion and love in equal measure. It has a sensuality that would have horrified Byron's contemporaries, but which shows a profound respect for love, sex, show more and women that was unheard of during his own era.

Now, as I'm closer to middle age then youth, I'm looking forward to revisiting Byron's Don and see if any of my perceptions have changed. show less

So much better than I remembered from college. The rhymes, humor, and slights. Life may certainly be not worth a potato when you are looking for a rhyme for Cato. A fun novel length poem

A very modern and readable epic. Though some (maybe... 5%) takes a pretty hardcore reader to appreciate, it was easy for even a big noob like me to have a lot of fun.

One of the finest long poems in English.