

No matter what time you live in, there will always be other people who think they have the right to tell you what's proper. Have you ever been told to stop acting silly or to show some respect? We bet that didn't make you feel too great, and Lord Byron is right there with you. What is Don Juan About and Why Should I Care? But Byron just wanted everyone to pop a chill pill and stop taking themselves too seriously. Byron was writing during an era when other poets wanted to talk about taking nature walks and the horrors of industrial society. This is due to the fact that Byron is both a great rhymester and unique for his time when it comes to humor. You'll be hard-pressed to find a major anthology of British poetry that doesn't have at least an excerpt of Don Juan in it. The famous poet Goethe wrote that Don Juan was "a work of boundless genius" and critics have tended to agree ever since. It's hard to overstate just how huge Don Juan is in the canon of world literature. The rest of the book tells us about all the wacky and sexy adventures he has afterward.

But Julia's husband finds out about the affair and Don Juan has to leave Spain. These urges take him into the arms of a married woman named Julia. This plan backfires when Don hits puberty and starts feeling urges he never felt before. Our hero, Don Juan, grows up with two spoiling and flawed parents, who shield him from all knowledge of sex. Byron, on the other hand, just makes fun of adultery and portrays it in a humorous way. The difference is that they would have brutally punished the hero or heroine for committing such sins.

Now, it's true that other writers in Byron's time would have portrayed adultery in their works. That's because Don Juan is chockfull of adultery from its very first stanzas. But the fact that he published these cantos anonymously shows that ol' Byron knew people weren't going to react all that well. When Lord Byron published the first two cantos of Don Juan in 1819, he told his publisher that he didn't want to get either of them into any trouble.
