Wagner, Baudelaire, Swinburne: Poetry in the Condition of Music

I. Swinburne’s Ideal of Harmony

Have you practiced so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass¹

Whitman made this remarkable challenge a keynote of his epochal book, and since then many—poets and scholars alike—have sought to demonstrate the truth of his bold claim. Swinburne, as we know, responded enthusiastically to the “majestic harmony” of Whitman’s verse.² Enthusiastically but not uncritically. “Whitmania,” as he called it, drew Swinburne to lay out his 1872 critical analysis of the American’s work. Whitman’s free verse led the classicist Swinburne to his analysis of “the radical fault in the noble genius of Whitman,” his “formalism”:

For truly no scholar and servant of the past, reared on academic tradition under the wing of old-world culture, was ever more closely bound in with his own theories, more rigidly regulated by his own formularies, than this poet of new life and limitless democracy.

(“Under the Microscope,” Hyder, p. 62)

This is acute, as is the entire extended discussion of Whitman in “Under the Microscope.” Swinburne argues that “as an original and individual poet, it is at his best hardly possible to overrate him” but “as an informing and reforming element, it is absolutely impossible” (Hyder, p. 67). Swinburne makes this distinction because he is thinking of what he calls “the everlasting models” (p. 67) of verse practice. For Swinburne, Whitman is a world poet because he brought to America and American poetry exactly what they needed to escape the “overweening ‘British element’” (p. 67) that had such a crippling effect on American verse from Bryant to Lowell and Longfellow.

Swinburne had one word for the meaning and origin of all poems: harmony. The word, the idea, is the gravitational center for an aesthetics—a theory that was also a practice—that pervades his work. Despite some excellent scholarly work, this aesthetics has remained terra incognita for a long time.³ The great prosodic scholar George Saintsbury was one of the last to have a clear grasp of what Swinburne’s work involved and how it was announced —and demonstrated—in the 1866 Poems and Ballads, a book quite as epochal as Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass.⁴

Swinburne’s relation to that congeries of thought and practice called “art for art’s sake” often confuses critical discussion. His spirited commentaries on Baudelaire and Blake in the 1860s led Swinburne to clarify his views later, most notably in his 1872 essay on Hugo, “L’année terrible,” where he makes another important distinction:

Taken as an affirmative, [art for art’s sake] is a precious and everlasting truth. No work of art has any worth or life in it that is not done on the absolute terms of art. . . . We admit then that the worth of a poem has properly nothing to do with its moral meaning or design . . . but on the other hand we refuse to admit that art of the highest may not ally itself with moral or religious passion, with the ethics or the politics of a nation or an age.⁵

The discussion reflects upon the entire cultural record, where “the ethics or the politics of a nation or an age” are regularly drawn upon, even promoted, by artists and poets. For Swinburne, the “rapture of inspiration” of “Hebrew psalmist or prophet” obeys the same poetical laws as those governing the conclusion to Hugo’s Les Chatiments, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal. “The reader impervious to [poetical] impressions,” Swinburne argues, “may rest assured that what he admires in the prophecies or the psalms of Isaiah or of David is not the inspiration of the text [i.e., the poetry as such], but the warrant and the sign-manual of the councils and the churches” (A Study of Victor Hugo, in Works, 13:64).

In 1872 and thereafter Swinburne accommodates the ethical and...