Byrons Don Juan - No Formal Ending is Needed Essay -- Don Juan Essays

Byrons seize Juan - No Formal Ending is NeededLord Byrons chief chef-doeuvre is probably the comic epic Don Juan, which occupied its author from 1818 until almost the end of his life (Trueblood 14-15). The sheer length of the poem is in itself grand its seventeen cantos take Juan through a variety of adventures, including the famous bout with Donna Julia, the sojourn with Haidee, experiences in Turkey and later in Russia as a slave, and finally episodes in England among high society (Boyd 22-30). Remarkably, however, Don Juan as Byron remaining it is obviously unfinished. Further, the poem was not published in an absolutely transact form until nearly eighty years after Byrons death (Steffan triple 562). The unfinished state of Don Juan and the circumstances which led to it inevitably instigate speculation how would Byron have ended his poem? The final canto of Don Juan (XVII) is date May 8, 1823, and was written just before Byron sailed from Italy to help the Greeks fight t heir innovation (Bostetter 9). Although he occasionally talked of continuing his poem, he wrote no more in the eleven months between his composition of the fourteen stanzas of this canto and his death in April of 1824 (Marchand 1125). The 17th canto of Don Juan was found among Byrons personal effects and papers after he died (Marchand 1234). Meanwhile, in England, Cantos VI to XVI of Don Juan, which Byron had penned in an incredible bump of creative energy from April 1822 to May 1823, had been published by John chase in four installments, the last less than a month before its authors death in Greece (Bostetter 8-9). Even within Byrons lifetime, unscrupulous publishers had printed many bastardly continuations of the poem during breaks i... ...d Chew passim. Works CitedBostetter, Edward E., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Don Juan. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, 1969. Boyd, Elizabeth French, Byrons Don Juan A Critical Study. NY Humanities Press, 1958. Byron (George Go rdon, Lord Byron), Don Juan, ed. Leslie A. Marchand. capital of Massachusetts Houghton Mifflin, 1958. Chew, Samuel C., The Centenary of Don Juan. American Journal of Philology 40 117-52. Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, ed., The poetic Works of Lord Byron. London John Murray, 1905. Marchand, Leslie A., Byron A Biography, Vol. 3. NY Knopf, 1957. McGann, Jerome J., Don Juan in Context. Chicago U of Chicago Press, 1976. Steffan, Truman Guy, & Willis W. Pratt, eds., Byrons Don Juan A Variorum Edition. second ed.. 4 vols.. Austin U of Texas Press, 1971. Trueblood, Paul G., Lord Byron. NY Twayne, 1969.