Byron Between Ariosto and Tasso

Abstract

“I think I can explain myself,” wrote Byron in Don Juan, “without / That sad inexplicable beast of prey— / That Sphinx, whose words would ever be a doubt” (9.50).1 I too hope not to need the Sphinx, but I shall not be able to explain myself without elaborating on the implied promise to situate Byron between Ariosto and Tasso—and not merely alphabetically. The question to be addressed here is this: in what relation does Don Juan, as a poetic project, stand to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, “A new creation with [its] magic line,” and to Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, “unsurpasss’d in modern song” (Childe Harolds Pilgrimage 4.40, 39)? The question is worth asking less for the specific reasons that Byron repeatedly links the two poets and in Don Juan adopts their stanzaic form, ottava rima, than for the general reason that none of the three poems conforms fully or uncontestedly to the traditional conventions of the genre with which each asks primarily to be identified, heroic poetry, or epic. But for reasons to be considered, the answer cannot be formulated adequately in the expected terms of personal affinity or literary influence.