Chapter 3 - Especially upon a Printed Page

Summary

Byron is unusual amongst epic poets in thinking of his poem not as the ‘single wonder of a thousand years,’ but as taking its place in the contemporary publishing industry. His cool awareness that Don Juan is a poem offered for sale in the literary marketplace disqualified for many readers its title to be a work of literature at all, let alone to be the epic poem of the age, but, as I suggest in Chapter 3, one reason that Byron’s poem has a better claim to embody the age’s spirit than The Prelude or The Excursion or, for that matter, Southey’s Joan of Arc or The Curse of Kehama, is because it can accommodate so many of the kinds of writing produced in Britain in the 1820s. It finds room for all kinds of writing from novels to advertisements in newspapers. The epic was the highest kind of literature but the epic of the nineteenth century had to accommodate all those kinds of writing that earlier epic poets would have thought of as beneath them.