can be deprived of this except by mere opposition, which should be resisted
to the utmost.
1894 1894
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
1837-1909
In a review of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mai (1857), Algernon Charles Swinburne remarks that 'the mass of readers seem actually to think that a poem is the better for containing a moral lesson.' He goes on to praise the courage and sense of a man who acts on the conviction 'that the art of poetry has nothing to do with didactic matter at all.' Certainly Swinburne's poems are not didactic in the sense of containing traditional moral values. As John Morley commented while reviewing Swinburne's first volume of poems, 'He is so firmly and avowedly fixed in an attitude of revolt against the current notions of decency and dignity and social duty that to beg of him to be a little more decent, to fly a little less persistently and gleefully to the animal side of human nature, is simply to beg him to be something different from Mr. Swinburne.' Swinburne set about shocking his elders by a variety of rebellious gestures. In religion he appeared to be a pagan; in politics, a liberal republican dedicated to the overthrow of established governments. On the subjects of love and sex, he was similarly unconventional. Frequently preoccupied with the pleasures of the
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ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE / 1495
lover who inflicts or accepts pain (particularly with the excitement of flagellation),
Swinburne also often turns in his poetry to the theme of homoerotic desire, a taboo
topic for his Victorian audience. As Arnold Bennett said of 'Anactoria' (1866), a
dramatic monologue in which the poet Sappho addresses a woman with whom she
is madly in love, Swinburne played 'a rare trick' on England by 'enshrining in the
topmost heights of its literature a lovely poem that cannot be discussed.' To a more limited extent, Swinburne also expressed his rebellion against established
codes by his personal behavior. He came from a distinguished family and attended
Eton and Oxford, but sought the company of the bohemians of Paris and of London,
where he became temporarily associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-
Raphaelites. By 1879 his alcoholism had profoundly affected his frail physique, and
he was obliged to put himself into the protective custody of a friend, Theodore Watts-
Dunton, who took him to the countryside and kept him alive although sobered and
tamed. Swinburne continued to write voluminously and sometimes memorably, but his
most fascinating poetry appeared in his early publications. He described his early play
Atalanta in Calydon (1865) as 'pure Greek,' and his command of classical allusions
here, as well as in other poems, is indeed impressive. Yet the kind of spirit that he
found in Greek literature was not the traditional quality of classic serenity admired
by Matthew Arnold. Like Percy Bysshe Shelley (the poet he most closely resembles),
Swinburne loved Greece as a land of liberty in which men had expressed themselves
with the fewest restraints. To call such an ardently romantic poet 'classical' requires
a series of qualifying clauses that makes the term meaningless. In his play and in the volume that followed it, Poems and Ballads (1866), Swinburne
demonstrated a metrical virtuosity that dazzled his early readers and is still dazzling.
Those who demand that poetry should make sense, first and foremost, may find that
much of his poetry is not to their taste. What he offers, instead, are heady rhythmical
patterns in which words are relished as much for their sound as for their sense. There lived a singer in France of old
By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
here shone one woman, and none but she. These lines from The Triumph of Time have often been cited to illustrate Swinburne's
qualities. Like some poems of the later French symbolists, such passages defy tradi
tional kinds of critical analysis and oblige us to reconsider the variety of ways in which
poetry may achieve its effects.
Another noteworthy aspect of these poems is their recurring preoccupation with
death, as in the memorable re-creations of Proserpina's underworld garden, frozen in
timelessness. And as the critic Jerome McGann notes: 'No English poet has com
