Byron's Don Juan - No Formal Ending is Needed
Lord Byron's chief masterpiece is probably the comic epic Don Juan, which occupied its author from 1818 until nearly the end of his life (Trueblood 14-15). The sheer length of the poem is in itself impressive; its seventeen cantos take Juan through a variety of adventures, including the famous affair 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 left it is obviously unfinished. Further, the poem was not published in an absolutely complete form until nearly eighty years after Byron's death (Steffan III 562). The unfinished state of Don Juan and the circumstances which led to it inevitably encourage speculation: how would Byron have ended his poem?
The final canto of Don Juan (XVII) is dated May 8, 1823, and was written just before Byron sailed from Italy to help the Greeks fight their revolution (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 seventeenth canto of Don Juan was found among Byron's 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 burst of creative energy from April 1822 to May 1823, had been published by John Hunt in four installments, the last less than a month before its author's death in Greece (Bostetter 8-9). Even within Byron's lifetime, unscrupulous publishers had printed many spurious "continuations" of the poem during breaks i...
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Works Cited
Bostetter, Edward E., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Don Juan. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Boyd, Elizabeth French, Byron's Don Juan: A Critical Study. NY: Humanities Press, 1958.
Byron (George Gordon, Lord Byron), Don Juan, ed. Leslie A. Marchand. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.
Chew, Samuel C., "The Centenary of Don Juan." American Journal of Philology 40: 117-52.
Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, ed., The Poetical 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., Byron's Don Juan: A Variorum Edition. 2nd ed.. 4 vols.. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1971.
Trueblood, Paul G., Lord Byron. NY: Twayne, 1969.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
Reynolds, H. (1990). With The White People: The crucial role of Aborigines in the exploration and development of Australia. Australia: Penguin Books
Furthermore, over the last 20 years, a number of studies have demonstrated the importance of culture to the health and health care of Aboriginal people. The limited understanding of Aboriginal cultures by some biomedical health care professionals can result in health conditions going unrecognized, or errors occurring in diagnosis and treatment. A study based on a comparative analysis of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal hospital psychiatric admissions in North western Ontario suggested that some Aboriginal people admitted for
When readers reflect on the poetry of the seventeenth century, poets such as John Donne and the
Scott- Kilvert, Ian. “George Gordon, Lord Byron.” British Writers. Vol. IV. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. Print.
Gender roles are a staple construct of human civilization, designating the behaviors and lifestyles that society expects out of its participants, with gender as the defining characteristic. Historically, females have been at the forefront of the conversation, with feminism regarded as the principal solution to the well-established issue of gender inequality. However, this is foolish. To truly mend the gender inequalities forged by thousands of years of human interaction, both genders have to be acknowledged. Both males and females are equally constrained by gender roles, however the effects of this constraint are in differing fields. There are studies showing that females are at a disadvantage economically, in the workplace, while other studies
Norton, Dans and Peters Rushton. Classical Myths in English Literature. New York: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1969. P. 311-316.
John Donne uses poetry to explore his own identity, express his feelings, and most of all, he uses it to deal with the personal experiences occurring in his life. Donne's poetry is a confrontation or struggle to find a place in this world, or rather, a role to play in a society from which he often finds himself detached or withdrawn. This essay will discuss Donne's states of mind, his views on love, women, religion, his relationship with God; and finally how the use of poetic form plays a part in his exploration for an identity and salvation.
Huston, Kristin N. "Percy Shelley and Lord Byron." UMKC Campus, Kansas City. 20 Sept. 2010. Lecture.
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Kelly, John. ENGLISH 2308E: American Literature Notes. London, ON: University of Western. Fall 2013. Lecture Notes.
Abrams, M.H., The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Sixth Edition, Vol. 1. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1993
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John Donne delivered, like all of the other great poets of the renaissance era, an invaluable contribution to English literature. However, it is the uniqueness of this contribution that sets him apart from the rest. This statement seems somewhat ironic when one analyses the context of his life and the nature of his writing, for Donne is clearly the rebel in English poetry. He is the one poet that deliberately turned his back to the customs and trends of the time to deliver something so different to the reader that he will be remembered forever as a radical and unconventional genius. This is most probably the way that he would have liked to be remembered.