ABSTRACT
The first poem, Don Leon, contains a powerful attack on the prevailing laws, which included the death-penalty, and laws against homosexual practices, with attacks on statesmen such as Mackintosh, Sidmouth and Peel. Though the emotional impulse and accent is Byronic, the poetic surface is not exactly his. It has not been possible to indicate the extent of the evidence supporting the view that Don Leon is the work of someone intimately acquainted with, and attuned to, Byron's life and opinions; nor the arguments against his authorship of the poem, as we have it, nor those which support that of Colman. The Don Leon poems are disturbing; some might call them dangerous; but they are great. Their poetry is all solid bronze, and their valuations just. In Don Leon a new planet swims into our ken.
