You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.

Today I'm joined by Claire Bucknell, a fellow of All Souls College

Oxford and the author of The Treasuries, a social history of poetry anthologies. With Colin Burrough,

she's presenting a series of close readings podcasts for the LRB on satire from Erasmus to Muriel Spark.

One of their episodes will be on Byron's Don Dewan, but today we'll be talking about Byron's other earlier work. Claire wrote about Byron in a recent issue of the LRB. The piece was a review of three books, Byron and the Poetics of Adversity by Jerome McGann, Reading Byron by Byron's Don Dewan, the Liberal Epic of the 19th century by Richard Cronin. Hello, Claire, and thank you very much for talking to me today. Hi, Tom. Thanks very much for having me. So you write in your piece that, having said, we're not going to talk about Don Juan, I'm going to mention it straight away. You write in your piece that Don Juan is a difficult poem to see past. That is what we'll be trying to do today. And that wasn't how Byron's

contemporaries, including his publisher, saw his work at all, also. Yeah, that's right. So

the point of two of the books that I was reviewing, so the Beattie book and the McGahn book,

was to turn our attention or try to away from John Dewan,

because John Dewan has taken up so much of their air time on Byron,

both in his own day once it started being published,

and also in the heyday of Byron criticism, so since the 1960s.

And in so doing, it has obscured the earlier,

so Byron's early works, so the sort of so-called dark poems, dark verse tales, which Byron's contemporary readers found difficult and challenging and interesting, but for various reasons, later critics have tended to brush off as sort of slapdash, you know, uncommitted,

revealing an uninteresting mind, Tius Eliot's words. And in various ways, you know, just Byron

preparing the ground for, he was always really going to write, which is Don Joann.

Yeah, but he, I mean, that quote from Elliot, Bertrand Russell, went even further in saying

to most of us, Byron's verse seems often poor and his sentiment often tawdry.

I mean, that's the same sort of time, I guess, as Elliot was dismissing him.

But he, I mean, he famously said, I woke one morning and found myself famous

of the publication of the first two cantos of Charles Harold's pilgrimage in March 1812.

So that wasn't, people didn't find that difficult, did they?

I mean, that hadn't sort of instant appeal or...

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