Byron's Don Juan - No Formal Ending is Needed
Lord Byron's chief masterpiece is probably the comic epic Don Juan, which occupied its author from 1818 until nearly the end of his life (Trueblood 14-15). The sheer length of the poem is in itself impressive; its seventeen cantos take Juan through a variety of adventures, including the famous affair with Donna Julia, the sojourn with Haidee, experiences in Turkey and later in Russia as a slave, and finally episodes in England among high society (Boyd 22-30). Remarkably, however, Don Juan as Byron left it is obviously unfinished. Further, the poem was not published in an absolutely complete form until nearly eighty years after Byron's death (Steffan III 562). The unfinished state of Don Juan and the circumstances which led to it inevitably encourage speculation: how would Byron have ended his poem?
The final canto of Don Juan (XVII) is dated May 8, 1823, and was written just before Byron sailed from Italy to help the Greeks fight their revolution (Bostetter 9). Although he occasionally talked of continuing his poem, he wrote no more in the eleven months between his composition of the fourteen stanzas of this canto and his death in April of 1824 (Marchand 1125). The seventeenth canto of Don Juan was found among Byron's personal effects and papers after he died (Marchand 1234).
Meanwhile, in England, Cantos VI to XVI of Don Juan, which Byron had penned in an incredible burst of creative energy from April 1822 to May 1823, had been published by John Hunt in four installments, the last less than a month before its author's death in Greece (Bostetter 8-9). Even within Byron's lifetime, unscrupulous publishers had printed many spurious "continuations" of the poem during breaks i...
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Works Cited
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Boyd, Elizabeth French, Byron's Don Juan: A Critical Study. NY: Humanities Press, 1958.
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Reynolds, H. (1990). With The White People: The crucial role of Aborigines in the exploration and development of Australia. Australia: Penguin Books
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
When readers reflect on the poetry of the seventeenth century, poets such as John Donne and the
“Lord Byron.” Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2009: 269-272. Student Resources in Context. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
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Huston, Kristin N. "Percy Shelley and Lord Byron." UMKC Campus, Kansas City. 20 Sept. 2010. Lecture.
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Kelly, John. ENGLISH 2308E: American Literature Notes. London, ON: University of Western. Fall 2013. Lecture Notes.
Abrams, M.H., The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Sixth Edition, Vol. 1. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1993
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Norton, Dans and Peters Rushton. Classical Myths in English Literature. New York: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1969. P. 311-316.
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