The "Desultory Rhyme" of Don Juan

Byron claimed to be influenced by the Italians when he wrote Don Juan, and that claim has become a critical truism. Byron's most astute contemporary critic Francis Jeffrey found the familiar, lively, conversational style of Byron's Juanesque manner brilliant, but foreign.' The Italian who Byron claimed most significantly influenced him was Luigi Pulci, a poet in the court of Lorenzo de' Medici.2 The tributes to Pulci in the text of Don Juan and in the careful translation of the first canto of Pulci's Morgante make it clear Byron wanted to acknowledge his tie to Pulci. What is more, we know Byron's first experiment in the Juanesque manner, Beppo, had its ultimate source in Pulci. John Hookham Frere's The Monks and the Giants, which Frere published under the pseudonym of Whistlecraft, was based on the passages from Pulci which Ginguene included in his history of Italian literature.3 And Byron admits that Whistlecraft was my immediate model for Beppo. Our question is, why does Byron turn to Pulci at all? For Pulci was neglected throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since the connection between Byron and Pulci involves the vogue of improvisational poetry in the eighteenth century, a brief history of this phenomenon will help illuminate our subject

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