SOURCE: Boyd, Elizabeth French. “The Literary Background of Don Juan: Ideas.” In Byron's Don Juan: A Critical Study, pp. 139-62. New York: The Humanities Press, 1958.

In the following essay, originally published in 1945, Boyd illustrates how Don Juan's literary precursors likely influenced Byron's treatment of war, marriage, women, high society, the supernatural, and other themes that appear throughout the poem.

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Byron was indebted to literature not only for suggestions which enriched the situations, the sentiments, and the characterizations of Don Juan, but for the cultivation of many of his ideas. Ideas came to him, he freely acknowledged, as much from his reading as from his own observation of life, and these developed into convictions when he had tested them by experience and introspection.

The literary filiation of his ideas about war in Don Juan clearly demonstrates this alliance between literature and life. Omitting Shakespeare, though it should be...