Don Juan

Byron’s sprawling comic epic reinvents the legendary seducer Don Juan not as a villain but as a good-natured young man swept helplessly through love affairs, shipwrecks, war, and the salons of Europe. In dazzling, witty verse, Byron digresses on everything from politics and hypocrisy to his own literary enemies, skewering the cant of his age with irresistible charm. Unfinished at his death, it is his masterpiece and one of the greatest satirical poems in English. Sparkling, irreverent, and endlessly quotable, Don Juan remains a joy—a poem that laughs at the world while loving it.