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Renunciations of Rhyme in Byron's Don Juan
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 49, Number 4, Autumn 2009
- pp. 841-862
- 10.1353/sel.0.0077
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Although Byron presented himself in Don Juan as a highly spontaneous poet with a knack for the inventive twist of rhyme, his compositional technique was in fact a combination of facility and industry, as demonstrated by the poem's many drafts and revisions. By sounding rhyming conventions in search of new linguistic and sonic structures, Byron produced a set of false starts and finished forms that revealed his taste for renunciation: a taste operative on aesthetic, cultural, personal, and political levels. As such, he bequeathed an insistent, supple, and polyvalent poetics to those who have followed in his wake.