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Time’s Intervals, Swinburne’s Triumph
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 57, Number 4, Autumn 2017
- pp. 799-821
- 10.1353/sel.2017.0035
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article examines “The Triumph of Time” (1866) in order to consider how Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry uses meter to shape the experience of time. “The Triumph of Time” is emblematic of a persistent concern in nineteenth-century poetry, poetics, and prosody for how form can affect the perception of time. Swinburne negotiates the difference between two concepts of time: one characterized by the organic unity of a rhythmic pulse and the other by regular division of intervals so rote as to be mechanical.