Poetic Value in Don Juan
Critics continually denounce Don Juan as a trivial worldview replete with idle rhyming, banality, and painful repetition; in other words, a joke. Even in the midst of this resentment, dismissing Byron’s distinctive style and form as having no literary value proves implausible. Don Juan follows no fundamentals except those of Byron’s own creation, a concept Elizabeth Boyd labels, “Don Juanism.” And within this unique framework Byron conducts his greatest experiment, Don Juan. ... This refreshing perspective on Romanticism elicits Don Juan, rarely subtle, formless by definition, and profound in context. Early editions of Don Juan lack Byron’s Dedication, filled with poetic critiques, as well as his prose preface to Cantos I and II. While not lengthy, these brief introductions detail the atypical approach to Don Juan, in addition to Byron’s satiric disposition throughout. “And Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion,”/ (I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),/ Has given a sample from the vasty version/Of his new system to perplex the sages;/’T is poetry-at least by his assertion,/And may appear so when the dog-star rages--/And he who understand it would be able/To add a story to the Tower of Babel” (Don Juan, Dedication, st. ... When considering how many critics lack the Preface, the harsh resentment Don Juan receives seems tenuous. ... Swinburne, an illustrious detractor of Don Juan, yet devotee of Byron’s previous Romantic forays, has mixed feelings on Byron’s new literary conduit: The style of Don Juan is a somewhat inexact phrase, for the most obvious quality of the poem is its variety, its multiplicity of styles, or, more accurately, of tones.