Byron's Poetics of Indigestion

Abstract:This article argues that Lord Byron's Don Juan repeatedly references digestion-and failures of digestion-to register the visceral effects of almost twenty years of near-continuous global warfare on bodies and especially stomachs. If epic is traditionally understood as a poetic form that aggrandizes and gives coherence to the brutality of war, Don Juan reworks epic as a way of rendering the experience of war poetically undigestible. In doing so, the poem develops a non-reparative poetics of indigestion that represents the violence and trauma of war without attempting to celebrate war or make it easily consumable.