Don Juan

Don Juan does not seduce women in Byron’s version of the story. He is seduced by them — endlessly, across sixteen cantos, from Spain to a Greek island to a Turkish harem to the court of Catherine the Great to the drawing rooms of English aristocratic society. And surrounding this picaresque adventure is something even more extraordinary: Byron’s running commentary on everything he thinks and feels and despises and loves, in a voice so alive, so funny, and so relentlessly brilliant that it has never been equalled.

Many critics consider Don Juan the greatest poem in the English language — or at least the most enjoyable. Byron began it in 1818 and was still writing when he died in Greece in 1824, and his refusal to ever quite finish it feels appropriate: this is a poem that wants to go on forever, that finds new things to say on every page, that can shift from bawdy comedy to heartbreaking lyric to savage political satire within a single stanza.

Essential Byron. Essential Romanticism. Essential English literature. Published by Penguin Classics.