Swinburne

Following last year's edition of Terry L. Meyers' Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Jerome McGann and Charles Sligh's Major Poems and Selected Prose, this year has also seen the publication of a long anticipated work in the form of Catherine Maxwell's Swinburne. Together with Maxwell, however, the passing year has provided an interesting variety of Swinburne material. Apart from studies that specifically focus on Swinburne, a great portion of the works discussed below present him as part of much broader contexts. More than in previous years, therefore, Swinburne's poetry and prose are regarded as representing and participating in larger cultural, literary, and aesthetic phenomena.

Catherine Maxwell's Swinburne (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2006), as Maxwell herself declares, is intended to provide an introductory edition that would assist general readers to "orient themselves . . . by examining a representative sample of Swinburne's work" (p. 10). This she does wonderfully by weaving together biographical facts, close readings, and references to various scholarly studies. A great deal of Maxwell's introduction is dedicated to discussing the reasons for Swinburne's scholarly neglect, which, she argues, was to a great extent the result of "the many kinds of caricature levelled at the poet throughout his career and afterwards" (pp. 4-5). In arguing so, Maxwell introduces an original view which will surely contribute to the ongoing debate about Swinburne's poetic and public image. The book's first chapter focuses on the poetry of the 1860s; Maxwell's point of departure is Swinburne's response to sensation literature conventions and the manner he manages to manipulate them for his own purposes. The poems she discusses in detail are "Before the Mirror" (in what is one of the best analyses of the poem to date), "Sapphics," and "Pasiphae"—a poem that never found its way into Poems and Ballads, First Series because of its rather blunt concern with bestiality, and one that has never been available to the general public before. In her second chapter, Maxwell addresses Swinburne's poetry up to 1878. Starting with the political poetry of Songs Before Sunrise, she provides her readers with a very good review of Swinburne's personal and ideological relationship with Giuseppe Mazzini, a relationship whose influence can be felt in poems such as "Siena" and "Hertha." Next, Maxwell turns to Erechtheus (misspelled throughout as Erectheus), which she considers as continuing the radical tone of "Siena" and "Hertha," mainly in the manner it depicts its central female figures. The last part of this chapter is dedicated to Poems and Ballads, Second Series, a "volume pervaded by the sense of regret and nostalgia" (p. 71), as shown in Maxwell's close reading of "Relics" and "A Vision of Spring in Winter." The book's third chapter explores Swinburne's aesthetic prose, mainly through "The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti" (1870) and "Simeon Solomon: Notes on His 'Vision of Love' and Other Studies" (1871). In this respect, Maxwell participates in what seems to be a growing interest in Swinburne's prose writing, a recent example of which is McGann and Sligh's edition mentioned above. Finally, in her Coda, Maxwell turns to Tristram of Lyonesse which she regards as "an unorthodox but nonetheless strongly religious poem that strives to express a universal spiritual power that inheres in and cannot be separated from the natural rhythms of physical and material existence" (p. 112). As such, Tristram challenges Ruskin's idea of the pathetic fallacy by showing "that feeling resides both in nature and its beholders and that they are thus co-involved and reinforce each other" (p. 119). Even though Maxwell is very successful in broadening her readers' knowledge of Swinburne beyond the canonical Atalanta in Calydon and Poems and Ballads, First Series, her insistence on not addressing works that were written after 1882 by arguing that "Swinburne's imaginative powers waned during the later part of his life" (p. 11) seems to follow Swinburne's bitterest critics. Such general dismissal of the last twenty-five years of Swinburne's career simply disregards the subtleties of his poetic experimentation. A brief discussion or even...