- Swinburne’s Apollo: Myth, Faith, and Victorian Spirituality by Yisrael Levin, and: Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate ed. by Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista
In his essay “Swinburne as Poet” (1920), T. S. Eliot infamously accuses his predecessor of elevating sound over sense—a charge that has haunted Swinburne scholarship ever since. Yisrael Levin capably combats this charge in Swinburne’s Apollo; Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista’s excellent essay collection Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate also refutes it.
Levin takes on an ambitious task in his recent monograph. He sets rather narrow parameters for his analysis as he considers Swinburne’s poetic depictions of the Greek sun [End Page 170] god. Nonetheless, he aspires to shed new light not only on Swinburne’s complex conceptions of spirituality but also on the Victorian crisis of faith more generally conceived. Levin successfully achieves the first of these goals, though he could at times do more to establish a broader context for his claims by situating Swinburne in the intellectual and literary history of the late nineteenth century. Overall, Swinburne’s Apollo is an intriguing and often convincing contribution to the recent efforts to rehabilitate the poet’s critical reputation.
By arguing that Swinburne’s Apollonian verse continues to develop and gain nuance over the course of his career, Levin both identifies this poetry as part of a “comprehensive mythopoeic project that has not yet been examined” and resists the still-dominant trend of granting pride of place to Swinburne’s pre-1880 work (a trend that Levin also critiques in his valuable edited volume, A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word [2010]) (11). In brief, he contends that Swinburne uses Apollo to construct theological alternatives to Christianity and, ultimately, to abandon both theology and myth in favor of “true spiritual freedom” (13).
Swinburne’s Apollo is divided into two sections. The first, “Apollonian Origins,” opens with an insightful survey of nineteenth-century Hellenism; Levin is particularly interested in the fact that Apollo’s resemblance to Christ permits the writers who portray him to “express their pagan curiosity in a controlled and safe manner” (18). Where Apollo signified “aesthetic order” for the Romantics, his Victorian appearances reveal spiritual doubt and disquiet (34). Turning to Swinburne’s early Apollonian references (in Atalanta in Calydon [1865] and Poems and Ballads [1866]), Levin shows that the poet first begins to distinguish his volatile and rebellious version of the sun god from that of his contemporaries in his republican verse (that is, in Songs Before Sunrise [1871] and Songs of Two Nations [1875]). Here the double-natured Apollo becomes a destroyer of oppressive institutions, both religious and political, as well as a source of dynamic regeneration.
The book’s second section, “Apollonian Myth,” investigates the intricate genealogy of the “new ideological framework that would replace [Swinburne’s] debunked political ideals” (81). Focusing on “Ave Atque Vale” (1868), “The Last Oracle” (1876), “Thalassius” (1880), “On the Cliffs” (1880), “Off Shore” (1880), “By the North Sea” (1880), and “A Nympholept” (1894), Levin carefully traces Swinburne’s shifting conceptions of Apollo. These range from an abandoned deity who must be rehabilitated, to a source of sublimely overwhelming “spiritual pain that results from the emotional intensity associated with divine revelation” (99), to an entity that Swinburne apprehends only through a “convoluted matrix of mythopoeic figures” in order to temper and diffuse this spiritual pain (104), to an element of the natural world (a transformation that allows the poet to offer a “clearer, less vague Apollonian metaphysics” and to create “a self-contained ecological system” that poses a substantial challenge to Christian theology [115, 121]), and finally to a potentially tyrannical being who must be set aside in favor of agnosticism. In a brief concluding section, Levin adds that “The Lake of Gaube” (1899) represents Swinburne’s attempt to achieve...