Swinburne

This essay reviews the prominent scholarship on Swinburne produced between 2018 and 2019. The most discussed texts continue to be the quintessential Swinburne volume, Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866), and its principal poems, such as “Anactoria,” though also frequently examined last year was his long medieval poem on love, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). The preeminent approach remains historicizing Swinburne’s poetic form, whether treated as style, prosody, or genre; also substantial was the related topic of Swinburne and music: his poetic songs and late-Victorian musical settings of his verse. Swinburne’s interest in poetic songs of the past points to another long-standing issue that generated discussion in 2018: Swinburne’s medievalism. The final subject prominent in last year’s scholarship is Swinburne’s poetics of antinormative sexuality.

Historicizing Swinburne’s Form

The three studies that follow share a focus on examining Swinburne’s poetic form historically but differ in their methods, which are occasionally antagonistic. Laura McCormick Kilbride’s Swinburne’s Style: An Experiment in Verse History (Cambridge: Legenda, 2018) closely analyzes Swinburne’s prosody via her method of “verse history” to capture what is unique about Swinburne’s poetic style and to show his significance to the development of English poetry. Verse history emerges from the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno and the “verse thinking” of Simon Jarvis, and it analyzes poetic form experientially, tracing how prosody, in its unfolding, makes meaning by manipulating the reader’s attention and her or his memory and expectations of formal patterns and their associations. Kilbride presents verse history as an alternative to the influential method of historical poetics, exemplified by the scholarship of Yopie Prins and others. For Kilbride, historical poetics underreads the poetry and overrelies on historical discourses about poetry to historicize poetic form. Verse history, on the other hand, while it does consider period poetics, strongly emphasizes the critic’s analysis of the poetry itself; the critic scours its form to capture how it comments on historical context. Moreover, historical poetics often assumes historical difference, for example, that our suppositions of what counts as poetry differ from those of Victorian readerships. Verse history, however, often presupposes historical continuities to enable the critic’s reading to have historical validity: what remains the same between 1865 and now, for Kilbride, is English’s “linguistic-prosodic capacities” and “our ability to [both] reflect on how a poem works in us [and] discern similarities and differences in technique . . . across periods” (p. 22). Historical poetics likewise often recovers past practices of reading, whereas verse history describes the “communal aspects” of the critic’s “encounter” with the poem’s form (pp. 22, 21). In practice, Kilbride shows an impressive knowledge of prosody, a meticulous and exhaustive attention to the nuances of poetic form, and conclusions that are at times illuminating. But her deep formalism in turn risks overreading the poetry, causing her broader arguments to occasionally get lost in the wealth of formal detail that she scrutinizes.

Kilbride’s first chapter, whose article version was reviewed last year, is the strongest of the four. It examines how Swinburne manipulates the affective and semantic capacities of rhythm in his seeming Greek tragedy Atalanta in Calydon (1865) to produce its prosodic power. Kilbride follows George Saintsbury’s claim that the prosody of Atalanta should be understood not via classical metrics but via English ones. But since traditional English scansion trips on Swinburne’s syllabic variability, she argues that the prosodic patterns of Atalanta are best captured through the beat scansion of Derek Attridge. Doing so leads Kilbride to argue that Atalanta alternates two beat patterns— the five-beat dialog and the four-beat chorus—which associate with the drama’s themes and tones. Swinburne masterfully interweaves these metrical sets to create a “native English tension” (p. 47), which plays with his readers’ associations and produces his verse’s power.

Chapter 2 seeks to answer what makes Swinburne’s frequent repetition unique by analyzing recurrence in Poems and Ballads, First Series, particularly “The Triumph of Time,” which Kilbride considers Swinburne’s most repetitious poem. While scholars often read Swinburne’s repetition symbolically for its thematic meaning, Kilbride...