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Teachers' Resource Web Notes on Byron's Don Juan Al Drake, UCI, English 28A, 1994 Marilyn Butler's Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries The Cockney School consisted of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Peacock, Hunt, and Hazlitt. Not introspective or Christian like some German romantics; not reflective, private, autobiographical, withdrawn from society like Wordsworth; not religious or medievalist and exclusivist like Coleridge. They are extroverted, pagan, objectivist, and prefer narrative, drama, and dialectical verse over lyric or autobiography. Formalists, they experiment with genres such as elegy, ode, drama, verse epistle. (123-124) Byron's Don Juan, for example, is worldly; the poem unfolds in the Revolutionary period, not in the clouds. Context of Don Juan: Part of the younger romantics' challenge to repressive post-Napoleonic Europe and the poets with whom they associated it (Wordsworth especially, since he turned conservative or Tory, and the feudalist Coleridge; Southey too) and Britain lies in its promotion of a pagan cult of sexuality: against divisions generally, against Christian and State repression. Don Juan is "liberal, Mediterranean, extrovert, comic" (137). The heroine, Haidee, is Greek and naturally sexual. The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Richark Jenkyns Don Juan as "epic satire"—epic in an age that could not otherwise produce an epic; an unheroic age. See Peacock's "Four Ages of Poetry" for a sendup of the age's fears about the uglification campaign carried on by scientific rationalism and by the Industrial Revolution: progress and factuality are the death-knell of heroic epic and myth, the death, even, of poetry itself. What room is left for imagination or originality? (Of course, such concepts are at base romantic preoccupations.) DJ is a parodic epic, a "colossal satire" for a latter-day Bronze Age that can't turn out a Homer or even a secondary Virgil. War is nothing to wax eloquent about anymore—it is ugly and unheroic, like everything else. But again, Byron's epic holds forth the Hellenic ideal. Connect to notes on Butler's book above. The Norton Anthology, Sixth Edition, Volume Two The editors point out that it is really the narrator, not the passive and sometimes fortunate Don Juan, who really forms the center of interest for readers. The poem is not so much narrative as monologue. So how do I reconcile this claim with the idea that the Satanic school or Cockney school is interested in narrative, not lyric? I don't want to make absolute claims. But Abrams says also that the poem is in its way "moral"—it consistently valorizes such things as candor and courage in a world that does not reward such attributes. Hazard Adams' Seminar on William Blake In Don Juan, the key character is Byron's narrator, not the protagonist. Romantic poetics is not mimetic like a Shakespeare play since the narrator is often present in what he narrates. The idea of "completion" is a troubled one for the Romantics. Does it not cut off intuition? Read Byron's Don Juan, for example; in this poem, the act of creation is dramatized throughout. One could also examine the additions to Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. Blake will not suppress beginnings and endings, but he inserts something contrary to them. This attitude towards invocations is far different from Byron's neoclassical quip in Don Juan, "Hail Muse, etc." Blake, like other Romantic authors of long poems, wants to expand the lyrical moment; he wants to contain a single moment in a linear process. Byron's Don Juan is a process poem.
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