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How would you summarize the "Dedication" from Lord Byron's Don Juan?
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Byron's "Dedication" for Don Juan was a vehicle for him to express his political, literary, and personal views. It also set the tone for the epic poem as a whole. He criticizes Robert Southey in particular, but by extension includes Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. His attitude toward these contemporaries of his is one of anger, which is the result of their apostasy and defection from the Whig party (to which Byron belonged) to the conservative Tories. He also believed that poetry had deteriorated in the modern era—though from our perspective, Byron is very much of his time in the Romantic age.
The "Dedication" of Byron's Don Juan is, like his epic poem overall, a vehicle for Byron to express his political, literary and personal views, focusing in these opening stanzas on the poet Robert Southey. In characterizing Southey as the "representative of all the race" because of his status as poet laureate, Byron is being only partly ironic. In several ways, this opening salvo sets the tone for Don Juan as a whole, though on first impression, the reader might see the Dedication as merely an extended rant condemning Southey personally and taking a few potshots at other contemporaries.
The thrust of his anger against Southey is, of course, his resentment of Southey's apostasy and defection from the Whig party (to which Byron and liberals in general belonged) to the conservative Tories. But the themes of DonJuan center on (among other things) the general conflict of the individual against society...
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and against the demands society makes on all of us to conform, to adopt the mindset of the ruling class or of the unthinking "masses" of one's country. Byron had become disgusted at what he saw as the hypocrisy of his fellow upper-crust men and women in Britain. He expatriated himself to Italy, where he wroteDon Juan and, like many English liberals, felt more at home than in his native country. This aspect of his biography is essential to understanding the meaning of Don Juan as a whole and, especially, the meaning of the Dedication and Byron's attitude toward Southey.
It was not simply Southey's being a turncoat, an "ultra-Julian" (after Julian the Apostate in ancient Roman history), that angered Byron. It was the idea of subservience and conformity, not just in the social and political realm, but in literature as well. Byron disliked the work not only of a mediocre poet like Southey but also of his contemporaries who were considered geniuses—Wordsworth and Coleridge, who are mentioned as well in the Dedication, and even Keats, whom he refers to sarcastically elsewhere in Don Juan. The reference to Milton and his political courage is also significant because Byron believed that poetry had deteriorated in the modern era—though from our perspective, Byron is very much of his time in the Romantic age. Milton, Dryden, and Pope represented, for Byron, a triumvirate of greatness, in contrast to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey.
In summary, the Dedication not only embodies Byron's personal anger against "Bob Southey." It expresses as well his political and artistic credo and his larger theme of the individual's struggle against conformity and hypocrisy, which infuses his great epic poem from beginning to end.