The Juan for You and Me

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Recommended: Byrons contribution to literature

By 1818, when the first canto of Lord Byron’s Don Juan was published, Byron had already created a name for himself, both as a great poet and an interesting character. He had been known for writing love poems and epic romances with sweet, beautiful characters and talented, rebellious characters that almost always had a gripe with society. But as he’d transfer to the high society of Britain, he would begin to question the strict social norms that he was restricted by. But his life among the highest in class would end too quickly. Byron’s wife Annabella Milbanke left him due to, as some historians believe, his previous affair with Augusta Leigh, his half-sister. This event caused such a scandal in Britain that Byron left the country, and in his travels, he witnessed many things that he felt needed discussing (“Don Juan”). So he began the creation of what many today would call his masterpiece: Don Juan. In Don Juan, Lord Byron uses satire to criticize many aspects of society.
Lord Byron begins his poem in a fairly unseen format for epics, as a story starting from the beginning of the main character’s life. He later states that he will not write the poem “in media res” like many other epics (41). And thus he proceeded with the story of his titular character. Byron delves into the life and character of Donna Inez, Juan’s mother. Byron uses Donna Inez to demonstrate hypocrisy, one of the biggest themes of the poem, by making her the personification of it. In the first canto, Lord Byron writes that Donna Inez was “perfect past all parallel” (129), and that she required that “his [Juan’s] breeding should be strictly moral” (308). But later in the poem, the reader learns that Donna Inez had been having an affair with Don Alfonso, the husban...

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...he seventh canto, Byron contemplates “if a man's name in a bulletin / May make up for a bullet in his body”, showing that the little fame that would come from a death during battle doesn’t actually make up for a death during battle. Ironically, the names of the fallen brave won’t even be easily found or often sought after in the newspapers, making the sacrifice for the purpose of fame completely useless (Byron Canto the Seventh 265-272).
As Lord Byron’s life among Britain’s elite crumbled, he began to open his eyes to the immorality around him. After he was shunned by the people of Britain, he took the time to travel and allowed himself to finally express his opinions freely. He did that in the form of his mock-epic Don Juan. Commonly referred to as his masterpiece, Lord Byron used Don Juan as a way to comment on the world around him and spread his poetic wings.

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