Swinburne

This essay overviews the principal Swinburne scholarship between 2016 and 2018. Generally, these studies continue the long-standing focus on Swinburne’s early poetry—mainly Poems and Ballads (1866) and “Anactoria,” as well as Songs before Sunrise (1871) and Atalanta in Calydon (1865)—a focus further encouraged by Poems and Ballads turning 150 in 2016, which was commemorated by a special issue of the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies edited by Laura McCormick Kilbride and Orla Polten (26 [Fall 2017]). The recent scholarship also clusters around three main topics. While attention continues to be paid to Swinburne’s sadomasochism, the most significant areas of analysis in current Swinburne studies are first and foremost his prosody, followed by Swinburne’s relationship to Modernism, and lastly Swinburne’s interaction with liberalism. These trends and exceptional works are outlined below.

In the past decade, analysis of Swinburne’s prosody has been reinvigorated by the historical prosody of Yopie Prins and Meredith Martin and the verse thinking of Simon Jarvis, a trend rewardingly perpetuated by the following studies. Emily Harrington’s “Time’s Intervals, Swinburne’s Triumph” (SEL 57, no. 4 [2017]: 799–821) reads Swinburne’s “The Triumph of Time” (1866) to cogently show how poetry and specifically prosody represent time. Often considered a love poem, “The Triumph of Time” is set by Harrington alongside nineteenth-century prosody to reveal that Swinburne’s poem also figures antagonistic experiences of time: mechanical and objective clock time, which is progressive, uniform, and divisive and associated with meter; and the organic and subjective pulse, which is eternal, variable, and unifying and associated with rhythm. While Swinburne scorns the uniformity of clock time and values the variability of the pulse, ultimately he shows that each type of time requires the other to exist.

How prosody contributed to Victorian-era democratic politics is a prominent consideration of Julia Saville’s Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), which contains a chapter on Swinburne. In it, Saville shows how the sound patterns of Swinburne’s poetry contributed to an understudied discourse in Victorian poetry of “civic soul,” a term related to civic virtue and moral character, the well-being of which republican poets such as Swinburne sought to maintain. Applying Simon Jarvis’s theory of “verse thinking” to Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise, Studies in Song (1880), and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), Saville argues that Swinburne’s sound patterns express “a counterintuitive form of thinking” that unsettles habituated thought, leads to unexpected meanings, and expresses the counterintuitive, “nonrational knowledge” of the soul (p. 222), which Swinburne associated with vitality, civic ideals, and imaginative freedom.

Two essays consider how Swinburne manipulated prosody to evoke Hellenic meters. Beth Newman’s “Swinburne among the Hexametrists” (VP 54, no. 2 [2016]: 221–242) reads Poems and Ballads’ and Songs before Sunrise’s hexameter poems in the context of contemporary experiments with hexameter that tested whether it could best approximate quantitative Greek meters in accentual English. She does so to elucidate Swinburne’s cryptic distinction between poetic “law” and poetic “rule”: while Swinburne does not explain their difference, Newman suggests that the former enables a poem to seem natural, while the latter makes the poem mechanical. For Swinburne, the rigidity of poetic rule was exemplified by Matthew Arnold’s avowal that the English dactylic hexameter best approximated Homeric meter. To evoke Greek meters in a way that follows not poetic rules but poetic law, Swinburne adroitly manipulated accentual hexameter to produce an effect of quantity, while in “Hesperia” Swinburne suggested that quantitative meter could only be intimated, not imitated. Newman argues in her conclusion that Swinburne’s metrical Hellenism is rooted in his republican politics and masochist erotics.

How Swinburne’s prosody intimates a Greek ideal is also explored by Orla Polten’s “Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon: Prosody as Sublimation in Victorian ‘Greek’ Tragedy” (Classical Receptions Journal 9, no. 3 [2016]: 331–349), which analyzes the prosody of Atalanta to theorize how it seems Greek. Polten applies her expert knowledge of classical literary form to show how Swinburne manipulates the prosody of Atalanta—adding and subtracting...