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: 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.

In this extract from the episode, Clare and Colin attempt to summarise the plot of 'Don Juan'. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsyt

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Other episodes in the 'On Satire' series:

What is satire?    • On Satire: What is satire?  
John Donne's Satires:    • On Satire: John Donne's Satires  
Ben Jonson's 'Volpone':    • On Satire: Ben Jonson's 'Volpone'  
The Earl of Rochester:    • On Satire: The Earl of Rochester  
John Gay's 'The Beggar's Opera':    • On Satire: John Gay's 'The Beggar's O...  
'The Dunciad' by Alexander Pope:    • On Satire: 'The Dunciad' by Alexander...  
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne:    • On Satire: 'The Life and Opinions of ...  
Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’    • 'Interest' and reading in Jane Austen  

ABOUT CLOSE READINGS

Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books exploring different periods of literature through a selection of key works. Enjoy an introductory grounding like no other from Europe's leading literary journal: fluent, rigorous, irreverent and never boring.

Find more episodes here:    • Close Readings  

Running in 2024:
ON SATIRE with Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell
HUMAN CONDITIONS with Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards
AMONG THE ANCIENTS II with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones

Plus two bonus series:
MEDIEVAL LOLS with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley
POLITICAL POEMS with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford

Also included in the Close Readings subscription, the full series of:

AMONG THE ANCIENTS I with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones
MEDIEVAL BEGINNINGS with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley
THE LONG AND SHORT with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry
MODERN-ISH POETS: SERIES 1 with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry

ABOUT THE LRB

The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.

As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.