‘Byron and the Pathology of Creativity: or, the Biogenesis of Poetic Form’

In Canto I of Byron’s frequently bawdy epic Don Juan, following several stanzas about Wordsworth’s poetic “transports” and Coleridge’s lofty metaphysical speculations, we find our pubescent hero, gentle Juan, strolling pensively by “glassy brooks” and through “leafy nooks”—those parts of the natural world where “poets find materials for their books”—in an attempt to deal with his building sexual desire for Donna Julia (90). The Byronic narrator depicts young Juan as lost in typically Romantic, abstract contemplation of “himself, and the whole earth, / Of man the wonderful, and of the stars,” sublimely wondering “How many miles the moon might have in girth,” and musing on the flight of “air balloons” (92):