Don Juan. [Cantos I & II].

"The War and Peace of English poetry, Don Juan contains an epic sweep that moves from Spain, to the East, and to Russia before ending in England… At the same time that Byron's broad canvas foretells the scope of the great 19th-century novels, the poet's own sensibilities echo the picaresque 18th-century novels of his early reading, Smollett and Fielding, with their bawdy humor and sly inversions of vice and virtue. Unlike these prose narratives, however, Don Juan has no beginning, middle, or end. It draws us in, not to learn 'what happens next' but to hear what this seductive, confidential, teasing voice is going to tell us" (Eisler, 610). When Cantos I through V appeared, they did so without the name of either author or publisher on the title page. Publisher John Murray refused to print Byron's dedicatory poem, which ridiculed English poet laureate Robert Southey, and Byron refused to put his name on a censored publication. Because of Byron's change from his long-standing publisher Murray to John Hunt (brother of writer Leigh Hunt) midway through Don Juan, complete first-edition copies with all cantos are scarce.