dis-jointed time, without certain conjunction’’ is
a disruptive challenge to the haunted work. By
attuning his later verse to evocations of the
Byronic Hero, Byron avidly pursued such dis-
ruption—a power beyond control, a roiling
adjacency of the past that operates despite and
because of banishment.
I emphasize continuity in Byron’s poetic
career, an essential interactivity between late
and early in his canon, in order to counter the
standard characterization of Byron’s later verse
as a revolutionary repudiation of his past work.
This late mode of Byron’s—sometimes termed
the Don Juan ‘‘manner’’ or ‘‘effect’’—is usually
said to be test-driven by the playfulBeppo, which
anticipatesDon Juan’s ottava rima form, insou-
ciant narrator, and digressive tendencies. Jerome
McGann’s commentary to CPW stands as the
authoritative characterization of a crucial turn
in Byron’s poetry:
Beppois one of the most important poems in
the canon because it inaugurates the verse proj-
ect which was to reach fulfillment inDon Juan.
Like the latter,Beppowas written in conscious
reaction to the ‘‘monotony and mannerism’
(BLJ vi.25) of his own earlier Romantic work,
and to the ‘wrong revolutionary poetical sys-
tem—or systems’ of the entire Romantic
Movement (BLJ v.265–66).
McGann thus follows a long tradition that
reads the conversational, digressive, satirical
ottava rima stanzas ofBeppoandDon Juanas
not only turning the gloomy vortexes of the East-
ern Tales inside out, but also signaling Byron’s
decisive break with his past success. Despite the
fact that the writing of Beppo was an extremely
brief interlude during the much larger project of
finishingChilde Harold, this initial forage into the
Don Juan manner has come to signal a ‘‘process
of disengagement’’ in Byron’s canon, a repudia-
tion of pre-exile modes and themes. The division
of McGann’s influential studies of Byron reflects
an abiding fissure:Don Juanfinds no real place in
the fairly comprehensiveFiery Dust;itisheld
apart instead for the laterDon Juan in Context.
Ironically enough, the latter study’s valuable
insight that ‘‘DJ is a poem that is, in fact, always
in transition’’—shuttling between engagements
with biography, history, forms of rhetoric, and
its own plot—seems purchased by isolation of the
poem from the rest of Byron’s canon. It is an
isolation that opens up real explanatory gaps in
studies that build on McGann’s characterization
ofDon Juanas an ‘‘assault upon the degenerate
poetical manners of his day,’’ an ‘‘attack upon
[the] romantic stylistic revolution,’’ and ‘‘Byron’s
practical illustration of the sort of critical stance
romantic poetry ought to take toward itself’’
(McGann,Don Juan in Context63, 73, 107).
One sifts in vain through Jerome Christensen’s
ever-resourcefulLord Byron’s Strength, for exam-
ple, to find an indication of exactly why Byron
would buck the system that had marketed him so
well, why he would launch the ‘‘revolutionary
text’’ (215) of Don Juan—a postmodern shakeup
of ‘‘Byronism’’ and its ‘‘cultural monopoly’’ (220)
that appears in Christensen’s pages as suddenly as
a rock through a shop window.
The division of Byron’s work and pre- and
post-Don Juanis often justified by his letters
from Venice, such as the one specifically quoted
by McGann, signaling the poet’s disengagement
from the ‘‘wrong revolutionary poetical system.’’
Byron was clearly taken with this disavowal of a
past revolution, repeating it several times, yet
doing little to define a new program, a better
revolution. In 1818 he would distance himself
again from the ‘‘wrong poetical system’’—a
phrase so broad it could refer to the Byronic
Hero as well as Wordsworth’sExcursion;‘‘I
mean all (Lakers included),’’ Byron wrote to
the also-implicated poet Thomas Moore. And
yet, as usual, the longer Byron continues his
repudiation, the more a complicating nostalgia
enters into his writing. ‘‘‘Us youth’ were on the
wrong tack,’’ Byron elaborates, ‘‘But I never did
say that we did not sail well.’’ As Peter Manning
has pertinently observed, the buried reference to
Falstaff in Byron’s letter could easily signal ulte-
rior tactics, and certainly muddles the letter as a
statement of intent. The next modulations of the
letter to Moore suggest a simultaneous flighti-
ness and persistence:
The next generation (from the quantity and
facility of imitation) will tumble and break
their necks off our Pegasus, who runs away
with us...Talking of horses, I not only get a
row in my gondola, but a spanking gallop of
some mile daily along a firm & solitary beach.
(Feb. 2, 1818; BLJ 6.10)
Byron’s prose here plunges wildly from
the nautical to the equestrian, from post-
revolutionary sobriety to nostalgic pride,
from poetic manifesto to the merest biograph-
ical detail which, nevertheless, refers right back
to the entrance of that most hardened of early
Byronic heroes, theGiaour:When We Two Parted