On Satire: Byron's 'Don Juan'

Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza. But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’? In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is: they see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness.Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjGIn other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsRead more in the LRB:Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byronhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/clare-bucknell/his-own-dark-mindMarilyn Butler: Successhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/marilyn-butler/successJohn Mullan: Hidden Consequenceshttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n21/john-mullan/hidden-consequencesThomas Jones: On Top of Everythinghttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n18/thomas-jones/on-top-of-everythingGet in touch: [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.