The Style of Don Juan and Augustan Poetry

Abstract

In this essay I want to discuss some of the relationships between Byron’s poetic style in Don Juan and the English poetry of the early eighteenth century. There has been no extended treatment of the subject since Ronald Bottrall’s essay written more than thirty years ago, in which he tried to counteract F. R. Leavis’s argument that the relationship between Byron’s poetry and that of Pope is not really very close.1Although it has become commonplace to mention Byron’s intense admiration of Augustan poetry and especially of Pope, nearly all of the comparisons that one encounters are briefly made and undeveloped, usually because the author is concentrating on something else. In making some further comparisons now, I shall be concerned not with matters of direct influence (though evidence of that certainly appears in some of the passages I shall discuss), but with continuities such as those to which T. S. Eliot refers in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ when he writes that the most ‘individual’ parts of a poet’s work ‘may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.’ 2To define such continuities is obviously a means of clarifying the place which Don Juan occupies in the English literary tradition.