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Don Juan is one of those works that live forever. One of the greatest works of literature, Byron succeeds in encompassing everything in mock-epic. It has love, politics, passion and satire, to name but the few, and everyone should read it. Aeneid, Iliad, Metamorphoses and Don Juan, are in the same category, but the latter outshines them all!!

The poem attempts to encompass everything, as Byron tells us -- but everything literary, not everything in real life. War, stormy seas, tropical islands, British high-class society, queens and slaves -- all are presented as fictions, parodies, examples, not true portraits. Even the philosophy is purely literary in intent, none of it applicable to people on earth, but only to people in the world of early-nineteenth-century literature.

As far as I am concerned this is what great writing looks like. Byron was, is, and shall forever be the master. This is poetry at its best; funny, enlightening, entertaining, beautiful. It is a work to be read and read again. It is a work to be absorbed. It is a work to be eaten.