On 31 March 1821 Byron, by publishing the prose essay known as the Letter to John Murray, publicly entered the controversy surrounding William Lisle Bowles's provocative editing and subsequent pamphleteering which queried Pope's status in the English canon. Appalled by what he saw as Bowles's modish but ill–considered depreciation of Pope, Byron gave vent to his ire in an extended and uneven prose broadside. He was the only major literary figure of the day to become so involved; his prominent contemporaries, although they would have been aware of the controversy through its dissemination in the literary press, tended to be cautious about getting dragged into a grapple that was producing more heat than light.

Byron was probably not on his strongest ground when arguing in prose and Hazlitt's sense of the poet's inadequacy in that regard has not entirely disappeared. In fact, Byron seems to have been wary about expressing himself in prose at all because (as was not the case with poetry) he found that it continually ran him into ‘realities ’ and ‘facts’. Prose is pulled strongly by the weight of its traditions towards argument, and Byron was happier interrogating the notion of argument than he was arguing himself. He seems on stronger ground, for instance, in the first canto of Don Juan (published the same year as Bowles's first pamphlet) where he thinks about becoming a prose controversialist but then nimbly holds off the idea amidst the ironic enfoldings of the poetic text: