Romantic Elements in Don Juan:

Byron is the chief exponent and most renowned figure of the whole Romantic Movement. But he is hardly a romantic at all. His apology is not in favor of romanticism as it was with his contemporaries including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Southey, Scott. He was not a romantic in the way the word means for the traditional romantics. Byron was fascinated by the Augustan code of life which was a consistent reincarnation of the classical view of life. Not imagination but the exercise of instinct is important for life was his ideal. So in his work as in his life was a creature of instinct.

Don Juan and Romanticism:

If we consider his treatment of nature, we find that Byron looks at nature with his classical eyes. Nature occupies special position in the poetry of the romantics. Wordsworth looked at nature as a benign mother. He identified an image of God in the impression of nature. Keats discovered a sensuous trait in nature. Nature appeared to him as a sensuous apparition. But in Don Juan we do not find enough sensuous imagery taken from nature. Though like Keats, Byron describes nature beautifully:

'Tis sweet to see the evening star appear

'Tis sweet to listen as the night winds creep

From leaf to leaf: 'is to view on high

The rainbow, based on ocean, span the sky.

Byron is a realist rather than a romantic poet. For this nature does not appear to him as a fairy force. Byron's realism of observation was a way of exposing the corruption of human nature. He criticized the suppression of sex and illicit love. The problem of Julia in a relationship with Alfonso and of Inez with Jose, and Julia with Juan, Inez with Alfonso, is visualized clearly and condemned with due arguments. Sometimes society has compelled these characters to get escape of this sorrow. This comic revelation of vices by Pope in the 18^th century has given a moral confused position of human superficialities.

Byron differed from other romantic poets in the complex character of his response to experience. In his earlier poetry he has tried to look at things from almost a single point of view, but in Don Juan he abandoned this and exploited the whole range of his feelings. Whereas other Romantics tended to follow a single principle in their approach to life, Byron followed his own way-ward changing moods. Like the romantics his nature could not be confined to one single channel. He had a variety of tastes and responses. He has an omnivorous taste from experience and tried most things that came his way. The result of that his great poem Don Juan provides a vivid and searching commentary on the contemporary rescue.

Byron was the romantic of the romantics. He was more typical of his time than either Wordsworth or Shelley, for Byron absorbed the life around him and expressed what thousands of his contemporaries felt. Though nature is not a moral being in Don Juan, there is no doubt that it is an inspiration behind poetry. To clarify human understanding was the chief aim of the Romantics which is relevant to Byron. It cannot be denied that he was fascinated by the Augustan age, but here is difference between the classicism of Pope and the classicism of Byron. Pope and Dryden seem characteristically to write as the spokesmen write of a coherent and civilized social group, Byron with an equally keen awareness of his public.

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