Don Juan is one of the five great long poems in English, alongside Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400), Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), and Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850). But it rarely receives the degree of recognition which that status should imply. One of the reasons for this is that Byron’s poem does not wear its ambitions on its sleeve as these other works do. The Canterbury Tales clearly constitutes a synoptic account of English medieval life, and Spenser went so far as to write a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1589, explaining that his unfinished epic would dramatize the ‘twelve private moral virtues’ of the Christian gentleman. Milton said that Paradise Lost would do nothing less than ‘justify the ways of God to men’ (a thing ‘unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’, according to him), and even when Wordsworth referred to The Prelude modestly as ‘the poem on the growth of my own mind’ it was something more than his own personal development he was thinking of – the growth of his mind would in his view be a norm and standard for the rest of humanity.

By comparison, Byron was diffident where the aims of Don Juan were concerned. Some comments are typical: ‘meant to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing’ (LJ VI. 67); ‘merely some situations – which are taken from life’; ‘a work never intended to be serious’, with no ‘intention but to giggle and make giggle’ (LJ VI. 77, 208); ‘a poetical Tristram Shandy – or Montaigne’s Essays with a story for a hinge’ (LJ X. 150). True, he also referred to it as ‘the most moral of poems’ (LJ VI. 99), but in only the vaguest of terms.