T. S. Eliot and A. C. Swinburne: Decadent Bodies, Modern Visualities, and Changing Modes of Perception

Eliot claimed to have bypassed the "diffuse," "Romantic," "effeminate" British Decadent legacy that had privileged "sound" over "concrete image" in favor of French urban poets such as Charles Baudelaire or Jules Laforgue.¹ And perhaps because modernism so successfully rid itself of A. C. Swinburne's infectious aural traits, critics have not recognized the profound visual impact of his pagan "natural" landscapes on modern urban/war poetry. In an age defined by world war and large scale technology, Swinburne's Decadent images of drowning and storm-shattered bodies accrued new iconic significance. Far from projecting utopian "romantic" visions of lost "unity," the Decadent's Sapphic sublime of elemental obliteration—surfacing initially in H.D.'s (and Pound's) imagist, floral bodies whirled by a maelstrom of forces—dramatized at once modernity's keenly shattering intensity and a correspondent awareness of corporeal fragility.² It has become a commonplace that Eliot's Baudelairian "Fourmillante cité" reflects back the alienated "etherized" modern subject. However, by contrast, Swinburnian pagan sites of death by drowning and snowstorm frequently stage spectacles of an Eliotic numbed body stung into sharp, percipient, erotic self-realization by the metropolis, world war, and technology. Thus in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock's" concluding Swinburnian turn "seaward," modernity awakens the speaker into acute erotic sentience—"human voices wake us, and we drown"—from the bodily/perceptual haze of its overtly urban sections.³ Images spinning out the "chilled delirium" and "beauty in terror" denied to a sensually deprived Gerontion who never "fought in the warm rain" propel the downed gull across Belle Isle's "windy straits" to its Swinburnian-Sapphic death by crystal, "white feathers in the snow" (CPP, 21, 23). Tim Armstrong argues in Modernism, Technology and the Body that technology renders the body supersensual.⁴ And Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" taken in tandem with "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" imply that under the pressures of modernity's life-threatening stimuli, all modes of perception—erotic, aesthetic, visionary—become predicated on "shock."⁵ Further, Benjamin's choice of Baudelaire (Swinburne's master) as the lyric poet who best incorporates a shock-aesthetic capable of competing with film's blitzing medium, prescribes a modern poetics based on Decadent self-shattering structures of eros and imaginative self-realization. Thus Benjamin alludes to Baudelaire's equation of "the creative process" with a "duel" "in which the artist, just before being beaten, screams in fright" (I, 163). And, citing Baudelaire's "À Une Passante" as an illustration of "sexual shock" arising under the conditions of "urban traffic," Benjamin defines modern desire in terms of Decadent self-dissolving eros: in that poem, the citydweller is convulsed accordingly with "le plaisir qui tue" ("the pleasure that kills") by the lightning glance of a mysterious female stranger borne by the crowd (I, 168, 169).

Here I extend Benjamin's program for an urban "Baudelairian" poetics based on modern shock modes of perception to Swinburne's pagan landscapes, seeking to delineate a lyric Sapphic-Swinburnian "moment" in Eliot's (and other modern) poems. Like the more pervasive "futurist moment" Marjorie Perloff traces to Pound's "vortex," the Swinburnian "moment"—cut, spliced, and mobilized in accord with modern filmic modes of attention by H.D.'s and Pound's imagist/cinematic "eye"—shares a heady engagement with technology's speed, danger, immediacy, and attendant ruptured forms.⁶ However the fragile, Decadent body plunged in an imagist "vortex" of external forces, unlike F. T. Marinetti's avant-guerre "man at the wheel," sustained an elegiac pathos as well as mystic/erotic transport in the Janus face of technological "adventure" and war-ruin.⁷ Jerome McGann's recent comments on Swinburne's "nature poetry" as a powerful "objective correlative" for "the immersive imagination" suggests its relevance to such a poetics/erotics of...