Renunciations of Rhyme in Byron's Don Juan

Abstract

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.