SOURCE: Wilson, Carol Shiner. “Stuffing the Verdant Goose: Culinary Esthetics in Don Juan.” Mosaic, 24, nos. 3-4 (summer-fall 1991): 33-52.

In the following essay, Wilson discusses the use of culinary discourse in Byron's poem, suggesting that it not only reflects the poet's personal obsession with food and alcohol, but also satirizes what he considered the poor taste in poetry exhibited by many of his contemporaries.

Food and drink, literal and metaphorical, abound in Byron's satiric masterpiece, Don Juan. Roasts, ragoûts, fishes, fowl, oysters, olla podrida, champagne, tea, and distilled spirits are repeatedly used as signs by an author keenly aware of the rich literary, cultural and political associations of such images; simultaneously, they function as the intensely personal fixations of the oral-compulsive poet who, battling obesity throughout his life, acknowledged that he courted self-destruction by alternating extremes of abstemiousness and excess in food and alcohol. These images tend to...