Don Juan As Pleasurable Take-Down

I'm particularly interested in long poems written over the course of a life and left unfinished -- The Prelude, Ezra Pound's Cantos, and, of course, Byron's Don Juan. What amazes me, though, is how often these poems have introductions that are firmly set, or, in Wordsworth's case, are added on to but remain "beginnings." The endings are what are more malleable, perhaps. The prefaces and opening modes get set and then wheresoever the poem goes and grows changes; however, the opening bars resound fixedly.

Don Juan begins, technically, twice, and I'm mostly fascinated by its Dedication: an opening take-down of Robert Southey, but also of the Lake Poets in general. After so much praiseworthiness dedicated to these fellows, it's nice and comic for a poet to be a bit more forward in addressing his "rivals." Byron's comedy reminds me that to write a "serious" long work, one does not need to be so serious -- as a line from A.R. Ammons goes, "wouldn't it be silly to be serious now." An inversion of this line more suited for Don Juan: "wouldn't it be serious to be silly now." Don Juan is then almost like that other great Don of literature -- Don Quixote: the epic comedy vs. the epic tragedy. Don Juan sets the stakes high from the start as competing with "high" literary achievements but, although Byron is one of the highest of these poets in social class, he claims as his influences in Stanza VIII the "pedestrian" muses. Then his project and Wordsworth's (and, by causation through Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge's) are not so different: men speaking to other men through verse. But, again, Byron is more interested in tickling his fellow men than speaking to them, maybe (in both a humorous and sexual context).

To speak more directly to Wordsworth, this is my favorite stanza of the Dedication:

And Wordsworth, in a rather long "Excursion"

       (I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),

Has given a sample from the vasty version

       Of his new system to perplex the sages;

'Tis poetry—at least by his assertion,

       And may appear so when the dog-star rages—

And he who understands it would be able

To add a story to the Tower of Babel.

Byron, for all his so-called "crimes against morals" and possibly "humanity," ultimately wants a human race unified in Falstaffian laughter and joy (pleasure, too, in sexuality). He does not want to create a perplex system for the sages. He wants to bring back the true ballad -- not the ballad of loftiness offered by Wordsworth -- but the ballad of the road, of Chaucer, of inns and immoralities, couched in memorable verses. The Byronic hero, as we discussed last class, is dark and broody -- he is finally, though, ironic in his Byron-y.