Woman Poets of the Nineteenth Century, and: Swinburne, and: Arthur Hugh Clough (review)

Writers and Their Work, the series of critical introductions to authors and poets, published by Northcote House and the British Council has a well-deserved reputation for its concise, accurate evaluations of individual authors (a rare commodity in the current academic publishing market, where trends tend against single author studies) that have an eye to current critical tastes; and for this reason it provides a valuable starting point for the reappraisal of the literary landscape of a particular period. Three nineteenth-century titles recently added to the series are Arthur Hugh Clough by John Schad, Swinburne by Catherine Maxwell and Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century by Emma Mason. Of these three, only Emma Mason's study of Felicia Hemans, Dora Greenwell and Adelaide Anne Proctor introduces authors to the series for the first time. Isobel Armstrong (up until very recently the general editor of the series) is the author of the original introduction to Clough (London: Northcote House, 1962) and Swinburne was the subject of an earlier edition by Ian Fletcher (London: Northcote House, 1973).

In the cases of Clough and Swinburne, some significant differences between the first and second editions indicate that over the past three decades each writer has become a more established member of the canon. While the earlier editions attempt to make the case in favour of Clough and Swinburne, arguing for their inclusion in the canon and defending them against accusations of eccentricity, Schad and Maxwell are much more confident in their subjects. Maxwell does not attempt to excuse Swinburne's peculiarity; instead she excuses, or at least explains, his neglect during the first half of the twentieth century as part of a useful summary of the poet's reception history, which begins with his reputation as a poet's poet during his lifetime and ends with his return to prominence in recent decades through studies that have focused on representations of gender in his work as well as his poetic style. Throughout her book, it is Maxwell's project to broaden the possibilities of Swinburne studies and she succeeds in this through a chronological survey of Swinburne's major works that uses relevant contextual material to frame suggestive close readings of particular poems. The Swinburne that emerges is a less marginal, more modern Victorian: a writer whose work merits renewed attention. The publication of Jerome McGann and Charles Sligh's 2004 edition of Swinburne's Major Poems and Selected Prose (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004) has made his writing (particularly his prose, which Maxwell identifies as having been largely neglected in the past) newly accessible to students of Victorian literature and Maxwell's introduction, which itself includes the previously unpublished poem, 'Parsiphae', makes a valuable companion to this collection.

John Schad's study of Clough begins with Swinburne's assertion that Clough was a 'bad poet'(1). References to Armstrong's earlier edition within the work suggest that Schad is not so much reappraising Clough as continuing his study of the poet from where Armstrong left off. For a straightforward introduction to Clough it would perhaps be better to read the earlier edition before coming to Schad's study, which is the least conventional of the books under review. Armstrong's study identifies thinking, or the intellectual consciousness, as a focus of Clough's work. This is Schad's starting point. Clough, Schad states, is a bad poet because of his own poor opinion of poetry: his belief that 'words … are merely the rubbish that is left over from the main event that is thinking' (1). Schad organizes his study around Clough's thoughts: thoughts of God, thoughts of history and thoughts of...