SOURCE: Manning, Peter J. “Don Juan and Byron's Imperceptiveness to the English Word.” Studies in Romanticism 18, no. 2 (summer 1979): 207-33.

In the following essay, Manning examines the various symbolic ways that characters in Don Juan employ silence and language.

In a famous essay which mixes praise and contempt in characteristic fashion, T. S. Eliot observed in 1937:

Of Byron one can say, as of no other English poet of his eminence, that he added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words. I cannot think of any poet of his distinction who might so easily have been an accomplished foreigner writing English.¹

From this stigma of “imperceptiveness … to the English word” Byron and Byron criticism have yet wholly to recover.² The condemnation is best challenged by examining the assumptions on which it rests.

Eliot's privileging of the word...