Don Juan : epic-satire by Byron (1819-24).
... is now to castigate folly and vice and when in an attempt, as it would seem, to cut a way out of his difficulties, he chose for his new play one of the most popular themes of the day, the story of Don Juan, where the known plot required that religion should triumph and unbelief be confounded, he produced one of the most enigmatic and powerful of his comedies, a masterpiece, in the circumstances, of ...
... Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Keats. Under the influence of Byron he wrote "two interminable poems in the Byronian ottava rima based on surreptitious feasting on Beppo and Don Juan" which he was strictly forbidden to read at home. 4. Autobiographical Note written in 1951. Sethna's Papers. Page xviii Then followed the lives of Shivaji and Napoleon ...
... impatiently cut out or fierily molten from his single personality in a few crowded years from its first rhetorical and struggling outburst in Childe Harold to the accomplished ease of its finale in Don Juan . Less than this apparent plenitude would have been enough to create the rumour that rose around the outbreak of this singular and rapid energy. No doubt, his intellectual understanding of these things ...
... to have the true epic movement and quality. There have been other, though less successful, attempts too during the last one hundred and fifty years; and, besides, long poems like The Prelude, Don Juan, The Ring and the Book, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself and Bridges's The Testament of Beauty have also been sometimes loosely called 'epics', though epics with a substantial difference. And ...
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