A new great literary essay by the multiple award-winning DionysisKapsalis (including this year’s State Poetry Prize) is published, following last year’s essay What Dante meant to them – The buzzing beehive of the “Divine Comedy”, which was released on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the poet’s birth.

ROMANTIC DON ZOAN is where we can think that the ironic erosion (not the overthrow ) of Romanticism begins. In the face of the claim to authenticity, which he listens to and feels permeates the surrounding atmosphere of his work, Byron will enlist the machine of satire as well as the subtlest arrangements of irony and install them within the core of a new poetic self-consciousness. In this he will prove to be the least romantic of the Romantic poets, and ultimately, in Don Juan, the least Byronic, though there can be no doubt that the great comic epic is for Byron himself – as well as for his present reader – the natural continuation of his earlier work, its extension and culmination. It suffices in this climax to hear, digested in the windings of irony and under the tones of a high view of human beings, the echo of a horror that after romanticism will come ever closer to us: the horror of nihilism, of moral desolation. That is why this long epic can be so reddeningly lighthearted but also so deeply moving – so crucial to the rest of literature, while it still lasts, metrical and prosaic.