Byron as a fighter against social injustice and stereotypes of thinking
Written in a satiric manner, the epos about Don Juan became a remarkable result of Byron's versatile and largely contradictory activity. It is the poem Don Juan that is considered to be his most important work. Goethe and Shelley, Pushkin and Walter Scott, Heine and Mickiewicz spoke enthusiastically about Don Juan. It is in this poem, which broadly embraced various life phenomena, Byron fully reveals his own inner world to the reader. He expresses here his most sincere beliefs and his views on the vocation of the poet.
This whole poem is permeated by a rebellious spirit, which determines its huge role in the European literature of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Byron`s creative work is inseparable from the intense political and literary struggle of his time. All his life he had been an opponent of poetry which does not know the goal beyond itself and is indifferent to social storms and battles.
Already the first two songs of Don Juan, published anonymously in 1819, produced an impression of extreme audacity on English society. There was also an evil caricature of secular marriage, the traditional education of a young man in an aristocratic family, and numerous anti-church attacks, for example, a parody of biblical commandments. Contrary to public opinion, the poet emphasizes both the ugly side of the phenomena surrounded by a halo of decency and sublimity and the poetry and purity of phenomena rejected by traditional morality.
Byron believes that by depicting society subordinate to the power of hypocritical vice, he serves the cause of progress and contributes to the improvement of morals. In his opinion, frankness in everything that is usually hushed up must raise the moral tone of society, expose amoralism and cynicism, approved by religion and the church. Byron`s attacks on the church are inextricably linked with attacks on public morals.
Byron emphasizes the injustice of social relations, in which the spiritual weakness and emptiness of the high society's representatives do not deprive them of the right to impose their will on the people's majority. The poet reveals the ideological means by which this injustice is affirmed and maintained. He disgustedly speaks of the corrupt press, which, submitting to the government, with all its might, seeks to hide the true state of affairs.
Advanced critics emphasize that Byron's work, which is an integral part of the glorious past of the English people, must still inspire humanity today in the struggle for equality and justice.
