Powerful and gripping pieces of writing give way to moments of sudden and hilarious deflation, and Hazlitt complained that this meant Byron was using the powerful moments only parodically, rather than with any ambitious poetic intent.Īgainst Hazlitt we should cite Percy Bysshe Shelley’s view that Don Juan was Byron’s greatest work. Hazlitt conceded Byron’s skill but rebuked him for using that skill only to shock, as Hazlitt thought. Byron’s energies, as the essayist William Hazlitt noted in a review of Don Juan written days before Byron’s death, are directed against the listlessness and despair that would otherwise drag him down.
The poem is full of vitality, but as everywhere in Byron vitality, it is a response to an intensely pessimistic view of life and of the world. In fact, in one of those letters, to his friend Douglas Kinnaird, his expression of self-delight with the first two cantos captures that voice perfectly: “As to Don Juan, confess, confess-you dog and be candid-that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing-it may be bawdy but is it not good English? It may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world?-and tooled in a post-chaise?- in a hackney coach?-in a gondola?-against a wall?- in a court carriage?-in a vis a vis-? on a table?-and under it?” Unlike the Satanic self-dramatizing that was the source of his fame in the 19th century, in Manfred and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage especially, Don Juan shows Byron at his most self-aware, and the voice of the poem is very close to the voice of his letters. By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Februĭon Juan is nowadays regarded as Byron’s crowning achievement and his greatest long poem.
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