Why did Byron suddenly return to Pope at the end of 1822 in the middle of the English cantos of Don Juan? And what does this tell us about digressive poetics at the end of his career? Byron completed the first draft of canto xii in early December 1822, but before resuming work on canto xiii in February he wrote two poems in heroic couplets: The Age of Bronze and The Island. He also worked fitfully on The Deformed Transformed, the irregular blank verse drama which had been started in January 1822, and like Don Juan, remained unfinished at his death. The break in ottava rima composition was not unprecedented – he had left Don Juan once before in 1820–21 to revise Hints from Horace and experiment with historical drama. At that time, the interruption of his epic could be seen as Byron forsaking the licentious Italian ottava rima for neo-classical closed couplets and dramatic unities, mainly in order to teach a lesson in aesthetic discipline to Bowles, the Lakers and all those who, in Gifford's terms, ‘require[d] checking’.

When we read Byron's later poems in the context of their composition and his reception during 1822–3, the shift between Don Juan and The Age of Bronze, The Island and The Deformed Transformed appears not simply as a continuation of neo-classical rigour.