Going Beyond the Lyrical: A.E. Stallings’s Engagement with Don Juan

A.E. Stallings has long shown an interest in the poetry of Lord Byron. When invited to contribute to A Modern Don Juan (edited by Andy Croft and N.S. Thompson, 2014) she accepted with alacrity; the experiment in writing ottava rima proved extremely fruitful, not only providing her with a new metrical technique but also expanding her sense of what it was possible to treat in verse. This article examines the canto she contributed to Croft and Thompson’s 2014 volume and also another narrative poem in ottava rima, ‘Lost and Found’, written around the same time. As Stallings has herself observed, her engagement with Byron and Don Juan prepared her for new ways to write about contemporary events. This article examines this development, showing the impact of Byron’s epic on her shorter poems and lyrics as well as on her longer narrative works.