Don Juan by Lord Byron (1824)

Byron rhymes "intellectual" with "hen-peck'd you all," and that one outrageous chime tells you the game: a comic epic forever winking at its own verse. The Juan here is not the predatory seducer of legend but its mirror image, a sweet, passive, beautiful young man who is shipwrecked, sold into a harem, hurled through a Russian siege, and bedded by an empress, never once doing the seducing. The hijacking is the joke. The real hero is the narrator, a voice of bottomless wit who can turn, between punchlines, startlingly tender, writing that man's love is of his life a thing apart while woman's is her whole existence, then deriding English cant in the very next breath. Digression is not a flaw but the argument, a mind too alive to sit still inside a story. Byron died at Missolonghi with the poem broken off mid-canto, and no tidier ending could have been honest to it.