Summary Of Don Juan

Byron created works of art which respected and opposed accustomed conventions at the same time. Among the many issues that Don Juan addresses genre subversion seems to be the most obvious one raised by the poem. He parodies or attacks the conventions of epic poetry. Byron began Don Juan as “a literary manifesto to his age,” and he “vigorously attacks the literary pretensions” of his fellow Romantic poets, or as Jerome J. McGann terms them, the poets of “the Lakist School” (57). Byron identified Pope as one of his chief influences hence, he felt that his Romantic contemporaries who attacked Pope “showed their neglect of the rules of propriety in verse, a neglect which carried over to the debasement of political and ethical ideas. The decline of poetry [he felt, was] but a function of the decline of public values” (McGann 70-71). By ridiculing his contemporaries, Byron aimed “a practical return to the poetic position and understanding of earlier and more traditional poets” (McGann 73). The point of Don Juan, then, as McGann remarks, “is to clarify the nature of poetry in an age where obscurity on the subject, both in theory and practice, was becoming rampant” (78). Byron’s attempt to recover poetry from obscurity can be observed in his poem Don Juan. Of his poem, Byron wrote, “the truth is that [the poem] is TOO TRUE” (Bostetter 7), acknowledging the autobiographical influence of the poem. Canto I, then, becomes “a deliberate innovation to the traditional Don Juan myth,” in it