ABSTRACT

The wilderness on which Byron trains his gaze in canto 16 is not an exotic elsewhere. Indeed, the word highlights an opposition between the rarest conceits of which the poet-jester is capable, and the tame and tamed society at which they are directed. One female figure in canto 16 who illustrates Byron's political imagination, how it operates within an imaginative wilderness of rare conceits, is the pregnant country girl in a close cap / And scarlet cloak. The dynamic of assertion, followed by qualification and imbued with self-mocking humour, raises the question whether Byron's politics in Don Juan and, particularly, in the English cantos, add up to more than exhibitionist role-playing. Byron carries his penchant for philosophizing with zestful relish, but it is clear that his poetry conceives of its address to politics as covering and issuing from responsiveness to the enigma of being human as much as to topicalities.