Byron's participation in the Bowles controversy coincided with an increasing involvement in revolutionary politics, prompted by the poet's relationship with the Gamba family in Italy and his consciousness of revolutions in Spain and Portugal in the summer of 1820. It is perhaps not surprising then that Byron's defence, via Pope, of the sustaining values of literary tradition is charged with a political awareness that is very much of its moment. The polemical energies generated by the controversy, in turn, flowed into Don Juan, a poem that takes on a new philosophical and political directness from its new beginning with the Preface to canto vi. Overseen by his new publishers, the radical Hunt brothers, Byron was also no longer threatened by Murray's conservative ‘cutting and slashing’.

The terms of Byron's newfound political intent are suggested by a letter to Thomas Moore of August 1822 in which the poet discusses, among other things, the war poetry of Don Juan : ‘it is necessary’, Byron writes, ‘in the present clash of philosophy and tyranny, to throw away the scabbard. I know it is against fearful odds; but the battle must be fought’ (BLJ, ix, 191). Although the image is similar, Byron is saying something very different to Shelley's (in A Defence of Poetry) ‘Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it’. Where Shelley vitally metaphorizes poetics to suggest its real political function, Byron sounds ready to give up on the whole business, to get on the next boat to Greece, dust off his pistols, and forget about metaphors entirely. The will to action threatens to eclipse the purposiveness of the written. As Byron knew, however, tyranny is bound up in cant and thus requires a response of mind as well as body. He would, of course, get on the boat to Greece, but before doing so he would re–vision war poetry as something essential to the fight. In a world of ‘Cant Political’ the biggest battlefield is the public mind, and any thought of victory depends upon its shaping.

Although characteristically Byron chose to stick with Don Juan rather than starting a fresh poem, it is clear that the siege of Ismail cantos, which tell of Juan's involvement (on the side of the invading Russian forces), represent a new departure.