An epic-length poem without a determinable plan, and therefore remarkably accommodating of contingency, Byron’s Don Juan is founded on a distinctly modern understanding of reality as a subjectively realizable potentiality. But just as traditional and novel literary forms can coexists with each other, so can existing and emergennt concepts of reality, however uneasily. In Don Juan the tension between this new concept of reality and that presupposed by the theory of artistic mimesis manifests itself in Byron’s flouting of the same epic conventions to which he professes his adherence.
