"A Sword of a Song": Swinburne's Republican Aesthetics in Songs before Sunrise

Algernon Charles Swinburne composed Songs before Sunrise (1871) as "lyrics for the crusade" of Italian and worldwide republicanism. In doing so, he placed himself within a radical literary tradition that included not only canonical figures such as William Blake and Percy Shelley but also little-known working-class poets such as W. J. Linton and Gerald Massey. This tradition, which I call "republican aesthetics," developed as radical writers began to envision poetry as an agent of social and political change and as they attempted to translate republican ideals, especially their dedication to equality, into poetic form. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, republicans came to believe that what Blake called the "mind-forg'd manacles" of ideological oppression supported the brute force of the state, and that poetry had a unique ability to sever these manacles ("London" 8). Formal strategies designed to "cleanse the doors of perception" (Marriage of Heaven and Hell Plate 14) were at once the poetic expression of republican philosophy and a weapon in the war against "priestcraft" and "kingcraft." Swinburne articulated his understanding of this poetic theory, and placed himself within his "church of rebels," in two main texts (William Blake 55). The first is William Blake (1868), both a critical biography and a manifesto of radical poetics, in which Swinburne describes republican verse as the "fusion" of the political and artistic "senses." The second is Songs before Sunrise, which puts radical aesthetics into practice, enacting the power of poetry to "break and melt in sunder" the "clouds and chains" that bind the "eyes, hands, and spirits" of humanity ("Eve of Revolution" 145-47).

Though Swinburne is often regarded as one of the foremost formal innovators of the Victorian age, the intimate connections between his poetic practice and political program are all but unnoticed by scholars today. By contrast, in the following analysis, I examine the ways in which Swinburne's political commitments motivated his formal experiments. I begin by describing the function of poetry in nineteenth- century radical politics and examining the theory of literature advanced by the republican activists and poets in Swinburne's circle. Next, I turn to William Blake, in which Swinburne explores Blake's formulations of radical poetics. I then read five of the poems Swinburne collected in Songs before Sunrise, beginning with three--the "Dedication," "Eve of Revolution," and the "Hymn of Man"--that theorize the political power of poetry and translate the republican critique of ideological oppression into poetic forms designed to awaken the reader. Next, I consider "Hertha," which--in its innovative verse forms, modulations of rhythm, meter, and rhyme, and unifying metaphors designed to convey liberation and equality--exemplifies the integration of form and content Swinburne sought throughout his democratic lyrics. Finally, I analyze "Christmas Antiphones," in which Swinburne's experiments with voice and audience, as well as his substantive political argument, demonstrate that his engagement with republicanism extended beyond the widely held British commitment to liberty to espouse a truly egalitarian politics that was the hallmark of republican thought. I believe that this analysis sheds light on Swinburne's conversation with a radical poetic tradition that included republican poets of all classes, and that it more generally suggests the debt of the canonical literary tradition to working-class and radical poets.

Previously, scholars have explored Swinburne's politics in terms of his treatment of religion and, more recently, sexuality and gender. ¹ Isobel Armstrong, for example, illuminates the centrality of sexually transgressive material to Swinburne's poetry, arguing that scandalous sexuality ultimately displaces the republican and antitheist claims he makes for the moral seriousness of his work. ² Richard Dellamora, similarly, indicates the ways in which recent attention to Swinburne's sexuality has been accompanied by a neglect, even a dismissal, of his republicanism. He calls Songs before Sunrise "disappointing" because in it, Swinburne "nearly ignores the awareness of sexual difference" that motivated his earlier...