About this episode

Clare and Colin discuss Byron's 'Don Juan' as a complex satire that critiques Regency society while exploring the poet's struggle with his own power.

Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza. But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’? In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is, in this free episode from their Close Readings series ‘On Satire'. They see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness. Introduced by Clare and Colin with Thomas Jones. Listen to the full series of On Satire, and all our other Close Readings series, with a Close Readings subscription. Get 50% off a…

People in this episode

Hosts: Clare, Colin

Topics covered

• satire
• poetry
• Byron
• Regency society
• human vanity
• literary analysis

Keywords

• Byron
• Don Juan
• satire
• poetry analysis
• Regency
• Cervantes
• Swift
• literature

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Close Readings

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The London Review of Books, Close Readings, megaphone.fm

Books & works: Don Juan, Paradise Lost

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