Algernon Charles Swinburne

Abstract

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• Algernon Charles Swinburne
• Justin A. Sider (bio)

In these pages, a little over a decade ago, Alan Young-Bryant joked aptly that Algernon Charles Swinburne was “the most neglected recovered poet of the period” (“Swinburne: ‘The Sweetest Name,’” VP 49, no. 3 [2011]: 301). He meant that our narrow vision of the poet stinted the sheer scope and variety of his writing. If steady work has somewhat remedied this situation, today the remark also seems apt in a different sense, as Swinburne occupies rather less of the field’s attention than he did a decade or so ago. Scholarship on Swinburne is slight this year, though the four publications range nicely over the poet’s verse forms, intellectual affiliations, critical reception, and relation to cultural history.

In Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth- Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), Elizabeth K. Helsinger explores the sociable forms of conversational poetry—poems committed to the political and ethical work of responding to others, to “that which is not the self” (p. 3). A chapter on Robert Browning and Swinburne proposes that these poet are [End Page 404] interested in “conditions of conversational asymmetry” (p. 56), where one party exercises power over another. For Swinburne, these are the conditions of tyranny, the domination of priests, kings, and gods. Helsinger’s chapter brings welcome attention to Swinburne’s verse dramas and to the genre more generally. In verse dramas like Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Erectheus (1876), she argues, “the web of speech and song binding characters and chorus constitutes the real dramatic action” (p. 58). The Greek choruses are crucial to the radical aesthetic of Swinburne’s verse dramas. They form a strikingly active “participating community” (p. 58) that at once draws in modern readers and widens the perspective of these plays beyond the purview of their doomed heroes and heroines.

In Atalanta, both the central characters and the chorus suffer the cruel whims of the gods, but in the exchanges between them, they also create “a singing-together in which the participants realize . . . the laws of song’s prosody as a way of keeping company with each other.” This lyric community models a resistance to tyranny by imagining, in prosody itself, an order that “binds gods and men alike” (p. 63). Erectheus develops this project through its incorporation of odic form, making the interplay of strophe, antistrophe, and epode into a kind of conversation. In doing so, the play brings into community heroic characters, choral populace, and the readers themselves. These songs represent a shared effort at voicing human freedom in “a world of hostile forces” and tyrannical power (p. 69). Yet Swinburne’s poems remain essentially tragic. As Helsinger acknowledges at the close of her discussion, “these mediated exchanges in song do not fundamentally alter Swinburne’s deeply pessimistic vision of human life in a God-dominated, tyrant-ridden world” (p. 69).

Catherine Maxwell’s essay “Swinburne, Pater, and the Cult of Strange Beauty” (19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 34 [2023]: https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.8884) teases out the intricacies of the personal and literary relationship between Swinburne and Walter Pater in order to consider their shared contribution to literary decadence. Maxwell’s run through the memoirs and letters of the two writers and their circle puts them together on various occasions—drunken hansom cab rides, poetry recitations in Pater’s rooms at Oxford in the late 1860s, and gatherings at Edmund Gosse’s house in the late 1870s. Though Swinburne downplayed any relationship with Pater later in life and Pater himself was quite reticent, their meetings, gifts, and circle of friends suggest a fair degree of personal and intellectual intimacy.

That intimacy finds its most telling form in their shared pursuit of “strange beauty.” As Maxwell notes, both the phrase and the idea owe something to Baudelaire’s “le beau est toujours bizarre” (“The beautiful is always strange”), but [End Page 405] also to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s insistence that poetry adds “beauty to that which is most deformed.” Maxwell tracks the influence of Swinburne’s poetry and his art writing, particularly his “Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence” (1868...