Anthologizing Algernon: The Problem of Swinburne's Later Poetry

Anthologizing Algernon: The Problem of Swinburne's Later Poetry RlKKY ROOKSBY Oxford, England MARGOT K. LOUIS has recently drawn attention to the fact that one of the most wide-ranging surveys of Victorian poetry published this decade states that Swinburne "produced nothing new" after Atalanta in Calydon, and "continued to reinvent further replicas" of it.1 The same survey reads him exclusively as the transgressive sado-masochist of his early output.2 But pigeon-holing Swinburne as the author of Atalanta in Calydon and Poems and Ballads is as meaningless as seeing Eliot as the author of The Waste Land but not the Four Quartets, or Yeats as the poet of Responsibilities but not The Tower. No fair assessment of Swinburne 's poetry can be reached without a careful analysis of later poems like "In Memory of John William Inchbold," "The Lake of Gaube," "Loch Torridon," "By the North Sea," "ANympholept" and Tristram of Lyonesse. The problem of seeing Swinburne steadily and seeing him whole has been compounded by the way his poetry has been anthologized. There have been about thirty editions of selections and the majority show an overwhelming bias toward his first two famous books.3 The most anthologized verses from Swinburne are the first two choruses oÃ- Atalanta, "The Triumph of Time," "Itylus," and the "Garden of Proserpine." Of the twenty most popular titles chosen, only one, "Hertha," comes from Songs Before Sunrise (1871) and only three from Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878). The later poetry does not figure at all. The late Clyde K. Hyder wrote, "Swinburne has been peculiarly unfortunate in that his best work has not been available in well-chosen selections."4 The failure of mainstream criticism to distinguish the best 299 ELT 40:3 1997 of Swinburne's later poetry and the unrepresentative Swinburne that appears in the volumes of selections mirror one another. For this reason it is worth delving into a forgotten episode in the history of Swinburne's later publishing to examine the fortunes of the first official selection ever made from his poetry. In 1887, Chatto and Windus published a small blue book, Selections from the Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. This was the only selection from Swinburne's poetry available in the United Kingdom until after the First World War, and was widely believed to have been made by Swinburne himself. It was a commercial success, going through twenty editions. It has had almost no critical attention. Seekers of information about it will search the contents page of T. J. Wise's Bibliography of Swinburne (1919) in vain, as Wise relegated it to a footnote.5 Similarly, in Kirk H. Beetz's Swinburne: A Bibliography of Secondary Works, 1861-1980, only Locrine is listed as a significant publication by Swinburne in 1887. Yet the 1887 Selections holds not only an important position in the development of Swinburne's literary reputation from 1887-1916, it shows how the poetry has been fought over by parties with conflicting views of how he should be presented. The Selections of 1887 presents us with one of the most audacious attempts in the history of English poetry to re-position a poet in the mind of the reading public by blatant suppression of parts of his work. By 1887 Swinburne had been living at Putney with Theodore WattsDunton for almost eight years. Having recovered his health and a degree of order in his life by submitting to Watts-Dunton's regime, Swinburne had been very productive. He had published A Study of Shakespeare (1880), Miscellanies (1886), A Study of Victor Hugo (1886); the plays Mary Stuart (1881), Mariono Faliero (1885), and Locrine (1887); and six books of poetry: Studies in Song, Songs of the Springtides, The Heptalogia (anonymously), in 1880, Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882), A Century of Roundels (1883), and A Midsummer Holiday (1884). But there were signs that Swinburne's popularity was in decline. Songs of the Springtides reached a third edition only in 1891, and Studies in Song was not reprinted until 1896. Selections may partly have been directed at a wider readership with the aim of stimulating interest in Swinburne's poetry. But Watts...