Don Juan

What is Don Juan about?

Don Juan (1819–1824) is Lord Byron’s masterpiece, an unfinished comic epic poem in seventeen cantos that follows the adventures of the legendary lover Don Juan across Europe and beyond. Byron’s version inverts the traditional Don Juan legend—his hero is not a predatory seducer but a handsome, passive young man to whom amorous adventures simply happen. The poem follows Juan from a sheltered upbringing in Spain through a series of romantic entanglements, shipwrecks, slavery, war, and social satire as he moves through Greece, Turkey, Russia, and England. Byron uses his protagonist’s journey as a vehicle for dazzling satirical commentary on war, politics, religion, marriage, society, and human hypocrisy. The poem’s ottava rima stanzas combine narrative momentum with digressions of extraordinary wit and conversational ease—Byron moves from comedy to pathos to philosophical reflection with breathtaking fluidity. Don Juan was controversial in its time for its sexual frankness and attacks on public figures, but is now regarded as Byron’s greatest achievement and one of the finest long poems in the English language.