Don Juan is a long, digressive satiric poem by Lord Byron, based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womaniser but someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Unlike the more tortured early romantic works by Byron, exemplified by Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Don Juan has a more humorous, satirical bent.
Modern critics generally consider it to be Byron's masterpiece. Byron completed 16 cantos, leaving an unfinished 17th canto before his death in 1824. Byron claimed that he had no ideas in his mind as to what would happen in subsequent cantos as he wrote his work.
Don Juan has won great praise from the great. Sir Walter Scott maintained that its creator "has embraced every topic of human life." Percy Shelley said, "This poem carries with it at once the stamp of originality and defiance of imitation. Nothing has ever been written like it in English..."
