ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Satires from Don Juan. In Byron’s view Coleridge was consistently obtuse in his philosophical writings. James Chandler, however, believes that Byron is referring to Coleridge’s attempt ‘explain his explanation’ in the first of his Philosophical Lectures for 1819. Byron is of course referring to Wordsworth’s The Excursion. In his preface to the first edition of this poem Wordsworth made what appeared to Byron to be excessively grand claims. The Excursion, says Wordsworth, ‘was an attempt to produce a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society’. Byron refers to the political dynasty of the Grenville family. Like many writers in the Romantic period, Byron’s views on Napoleon were often ambivalent and always complex. The most recent treatment of Napoleon on the period’s writers is, Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism.
