Byron's ‘wish to do as much by Poesy’ remains partially and crucially submerged in poetry itself. Its incompleteness as a moment of poetics is its first claim. Its second, perhaps surprisingly, is on behalf of theory, although not of the kind Byron associates with Bowles or Wordsworth. The narrator of Don Juan is always keenly susceptible to the advances of doubt, but he resists the sceptic's satisfaction and conclusiveness; there is a restless search for origin with Byron that has something of Shelley but nothing of the Pyrrhonist. While sneering at ‘system’, Byron commits to theory where it recognizes itself as a process shaped both by knowledge of its own limits and the poet's right to judge. Byron's skiff and telescope are markers of this commitment, as is the notion of the ‘outline’ with its proposal of the poem as site of imaginative mediation and political possibility. As in the sketching, dashing critical prose, theory is both held off and pursued through an intellectual vitality that will not settle for a name. Byron's ‘wish’ is to write a critical and wary visionary poetry that throws off Romantic acculturation and its post–Enlightenment scene of division to touch upon ‘Eternity’.

So far I've approached these ideas mainly through the narrator of Don Juan as digressive ‘philosopher’ and weaver of reflexive images. Byron's poetics, however, can also be seen in the poet's work as a narrative artist, in the forms and symbolic characters that shape Juan's experience. As well as telling stories, Don Juan is fundamentally concerned with how stories are told; it is a poem preoccupied with the ethics of fictionality. Narratives are in their very nature selective, and their meaning depends upon their inclusions, exclusions and emphases. They are necessarily outlines of an implied whole that cannot be presented in its totality; as such they must assume (or evade) responsibility for the unrepresented. Much of this selectiveness is a form of disinterested and necessary filtering and a precondition for the production of plausible narrative art; it may also, however, be bound up in ideological or other agendas that seek to reproduce the world through an act of bad faith. Narrative, thus understood, might be compared to argument (as both Byron and Keats understood it) in plotting its way through a sprawling range of experience and possibility.