Don Juan Analysis

Byron chose a very specific poetic structure known as Ottava Rima to write Don Juan. This structure involves a rhyme scheme of ABABABCC (where each letter stands for a line's end rhyme). It's...

Many critics agree that one of the best parts of Don Juan is Byron's sassy speaker. Take, for example, the lines where he says, "But if there's anything in which I shine,/ 'T is in arranging all my...

Don Juan covers an awful lot of ground in this poem. DJ has to leave Spain because he has an affair with a woman whose husband wants to kill him. Then he travels to some Mediterranean island where...

At first glance, Byron's Don Juan contains all the fancy-sounding words of the early nineteenth century. Words like "bereft," "behold," and "assail" are ones that you would find in any great epic p...

Byron names his long satirical poem "Don Juan" to represent its title character. He takes the satire even farther when he insists that readers pronounce the second word as "Joo-an" instead of the S...

Lord Byron doesn't take any prisoners when he makes fun of his readers, especially when they're English readers. He creates his signature satirical tone by writing clever rhymes and often using exc...

If you read Don Juan entirely for plot, you should be able to follow the general story. The difficulty comes when Byron goes off on his rants about how silly English (and even European) society is....

Lord Byron loves to make fun of the English upper-class, which is pretty funny when you consider he inherited his uncle's title at age ten and became an English lord. See any parallels with Don Jua...

Above all other things, Don Juan is about sex. Byron can try to defend himself all he wants, but it's pretty clear that he wrote this thing to shock any audience that was even a little prudish. You...

Robert Southey (D.1)William Wordsworth (D.6)John Milton (D.10)Plato (7.4)Jean-Jacques Rousseau (7.4)Socrates (7.5)Homer (7.80)John Keats (11.60)Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (13.11)Isaac Newton...