Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #241466 in Books
• Published on: 1972-11-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 491 pages

Customer Reviews

Magnificent
Don Juan is one of those works that live forever. One of the greatest works of literature, Byron succeeds in encompassing everything in mock-epic. It has love, politics, passion and satire, to name but the few, and everyone should read it. Aeneid, Iliad, Metamorphoses and Don Juan, are in the same category, but the latter outshines them all!!

Magnificently written, hilarious and still relevant today
Basically i am writing this to contradict another review, the one called 'universal?' and dated january 1999. ive just finished studying this poem for my a levels, and i can safely say that absolutely everything in this poem is a parody or analogy about something or someone else, which is what makes it the masterpeice that it is. Juan's mother Inez is used by Byron to satirise both his own mother and his wife Annabella Milbanke. Juan's lover Haidee's father Lambro is used as a device to demonstrate the stifling effect society has on love etc etc. EVERYTHING in it is meant to mock something else. Byron writes little snippets in the style of Wordsworth then scoffs as at them to show how easy it is (for him anyway) to write that sort of poetry, and also lays into other contempories of his such as Coleridge and Southey. Byron says 'fools are my theme, let satire be my song.' which fools? the fools he knew from his life, who he wrote about in this poem. in order to get the most from this poem, it is probably best to read a biography of Byron in order to understand all of the reference he makes (most of which are extremely funny). i read Maurois and McCarthy, and i'd recomend the latter, 'Byron, life and legend,' by Fiona McCarthy as the best companion to Don Juan.

Universal?
The poem attempts to encompass everything, as Byron tells us -- but everything literary, not everything in real life. War, stormy seas, tropical islands, British high-class society, queens and slaves -- all are presented as fictions, parodies, examples, not true portraits. Even the philosophy is purely literary in intent, none of it applicable to people on earth, but only to people in the world of early-nineteenth-century literature.