1860s: Early Fame
Swinburne entered the public literary scene with little notice in 1860
with the publication of two dramas in one volume, The
Queen-Mother and Rosamond, dedicated to Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. The Queen-Mother portrays the machinations
of Catherine di Medici (the Queen Mother of the title) to persuade her son, King
Charles IX of France, to order what would become known as the St. Bartholomew's
Day Massacre.
In his 1970 volume Algernon Charles Swinburne in the Critical Heritage series, Clyde K. Hyder identifies two short unsigned notices,
in the Spectator and the Athenaeum, of The Queen-Mother and Rosamond. Both reviews were negative. The reviewer in the Spectator wrote, We cannot say so much of the two dramas entitled, The Queen Mother and Rosamond. We have with some difficulty read through them
A more extended and very sympathetic
review of the volume appears in
John Bull April 6th 1861. The unsigned reviewer finds in Swinburne “signs of a rich fancy,
and a powerful grasp of ideas,” “a very high poetic invention,” and “an artistic power
of no common order.”
In 1865 Swinburne published two more works: Atalanta in Calydon, a lyrical drama modeled on Greek tragedy with blank verse dialogue and rhymed, lyrical
choruses, and Chastelard, the first in Swinburne's trilogy of dramas on the subject of Mary Stuart. Atalanta received a more positive reception than Swinburne's first volume. A lengthy, unsigned
review in the Saturday Review observed:
Atalanta in Calydon is an attempt to reproduce a Greek tragedy in its ideas as well as its form, to some
extent even in its metres—an attempt necessarily chargeable with faults and weaknesses,
yet still one of the most brilliant that our literature contains. (540)
In an 1866 letter to Charles Eliot Norton, John Ruskin wrote:
Have your read Swinburne's Atalanta—the grandest thing ever yet done by a youth—though he is a Demoniac youth—whether
ever he will be clothed and his right mind—heaven only knows. His foam at the mouth
is fine, meantime. (96-97)
Poems and Ballads, First Series
The publication in 1866 of
Poems and Ballads was the most significant
event in the literary career of Algernon Charles Swinburne, and it
was one of the more significant and influential events in
nineteenth-century literature and Victorian culture.
An early biography of Swinburne by Edmund Gosse captures the intensity and impact
of Swinburne's explosion onto the cultural and literary scene. Gosse was sixteen when
Poems and Ballads was published in July 1866 and benefits from being closer to the action than the
modern twenty-first-century reader:
Algernon Swinburne in the winter of 1866 was simply the young man of almost fabulous
genius, who had produced a sensation among lovers of poetry such as had not been approached
since the youth of Tennyson. As an eminent critic, then an undergraduate at Oxford,
has said, “It simply swept us off our legs with rapture.” At Cambridge the young men
joined hands and marched along shouting Dolores or A song in time of Revolution. The volume was mixed up with other fire-crackers in the preparation for the Fifth
of November. It stood for passion and flame and revolt, it raced beside the swiftest
of its admirers and easily beat them. As Mr. [George] Saintsbury, himself an ardent
youth in those days, outside any circle of personal relations with the poet, has recorded,
“all the metaphors and similes of water, light, wind, fire, all the modes of motion”
seemed to inspire and animate this wonderful poetry, which took the whole lettered
youth of England by storm with its audacity and melody. (160-161)
Published as his first collection when Swinburne was twenty-nine,
Poems and Ballads was a large collection, sixty-two poems representing Swinburne's best work to that
point. The volume is famous for
its fascination with the femme fatale and representations of taboo or unconventional
sexuality, particularly evident in poems
such as
Dolores,
Faustine, Laus
Veneris, and
Anactoria.
The emphasis critics and literary historians have placed upon the representations
of sexuality in
Poems and Ballads has obscured the diversity of not only the 1866 volume but of Swinburne's entire
oeuvre. Jerome McGann has argued,
[S]o shocking was the advent of this epochal book that it would come to obscure the
range of Swinburne’s work—a range so extensive that one can sometimes scarcely imagine
how it came to be thought narrow or precious (207). This extensive range is evident within Swinburne's first collection, with its lyrics,
ballads, dramatic monologues (
Laus Veneris, Itylus, Anactoria, Hymn to Proserpine), other dramatic forms (
Phaedra,,
The Masque of Queen Bersabe), ekphrastic works (
A Christmas Carol,
Before the Mirror,
Hermaphroditus), classical forms (
Hendecasyllabics,
Sapphics) poems with biblical, classical, medieval, and contemporary settings.
Poems and Ballads is an expansive tour de force displaying Swinburne's virtuosic mastery of genres
and verse forms, diverse themes and settings, and compelling characters.
1870s: Political Verse
In the 1870s Swinburne's verse shifted focus to politics, patriotism,
republicanism, condemnations of tyranny, and celebrations of liberty.
These were not new themes for Swinburne, but the emphasis and focus on these themes
was a marked contrast to the previous collection
Poems and Ballads.
Songs Before Sunrise appeared in 1871. The volume was dedicated to
Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, a major figure in the nineteenth-century
unification of Italy. Many of the poems are explicitly topical, addressing
specific events and figures in the Italian struggle, e.g.,
The Halt before Rome,
Mentana: First Anniversary,
Blessed among Women,
Ode on the Insurrection in Candia, and others. Swinburne
often chose classical, biblical, or theological motifs to amplify his explorations
of contemporary issues and events.
Blessed among Women, for instance, adopts Marian
language and epithets in praise of Signora Adelaide Bono Cairoli, mother
of five brothers, all of whom fought and four of whom died in the
Italian struggle. And
Super Flumina Babylonis, borrows its title from Psalm 136 in the Vulgate and evokes the Babylonian captivity.
Swinburne's
Erechtheus appeared in 1876 and represents a return to the form of Greek tragedy first attempted
with
Atalanta in Calydon.
Erechtheus may be read as the culmination of Swinburne's republican poetry.
Erechtheus eschews the explicit topicality of the collections
Songs Before Sunrise and
Songs of Two Nations and instead provides a sustained classical and mythological framework to support
Swinburne's themes of Republicanism, liberty, patriotism and sacrifice.
Swinburne closes the 1870s with
Poems and Ballads, Second Series, published in 1878, a volume that departs from the preoccupation with politics that
dominated Swinburne's poetry throughout most of the decade. The influence of French
literature is particularly strong in this volume, which includes Swinburne famous
elegy for Baudelaire (
Ave Atque Vale), as well as elegies for Gautier, written in English (
Memorial Verses on the Death of Théophile Gautier), French (
Théophile Gautier), and Latin (
In Obitum Theophili Poetae) and verses to Villon, Hugo, and Théodore de Banville.
Poems and Ballads, Second Series also includes many of Swinburne's translations from Villon.
1880s: Transition & Maturity
Upon settling in with Watts-Dunton at The Pines, Swinburne entered an incredibly productive
period. In 1880 he published four volumes: three smaller volumes of poetry (
Songs Before Sunrise,
Studies in Song, and
The Heptalogia, a collection of parodies—of Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne himself, and others)
and a critical monograph,
A Study of Shakespeare. In 1881 he published
Mary Stuart, the final work in his trilogy, begun in 1865 with
Chastelard, on the ill-fated queen. All this was followed in 1882 by
Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems.
Tristram of Lyonesse—a Romantic epic in heroic couplets—is unquestionably one of Swinburne's major works
and one of the great long poems of the nineteenth century. Swinburne had long been
fascinated by the story of Tristan and Iseult and wrote about the legend in his very
early work
Queen Yseult, which appeared, while Swinburne was at Oxford, in the short-lived journal
Undergraduate Papers.
Following on the heels of this majestic, erotic epic, Swinburne published in 1853
A Century of Roundels, a volume that exhaustively explores a tiny form, the Roundel. Swinburne is credited
with the invention of this form, modeled on French fixed forms, the rondeau and rondel.
Swinburne's variation is a nine-line poem in three stanzas (abaR bab abaR, with the
R designating a refrain that consists of the first word or phrase of the poem).
A Century of Roundels, dedicated to Christina Rossetti, includes about midway through the volume a meta-poem
providing commentary on the form:
A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere,
With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought,
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear
A roundel is wrought.
Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught—
Love, laughter, or mourning—remembrance of rapture or fear—
That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.
As a bird's quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear
Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught,
So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear,
A roundel is wrought.
Swinburne was also a prolific
composer of sonnets (see, for instance,
Hermaphroditus,
Love and Sleep,
A Death on Easter Day,
On Lamb's Specimens of Dramatic Poets,
On the Russian Persecution of the Jews,
Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650),
A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning). Swinburne was frequently charged by critics with excessive verbosity and lack of
concision. These comments on
Thalassius, from an unsigned review of
Songs of the Springtides in
The Saturday Review, are typical:
Surely it is not an unfair or captious criticism which sees in Thalassius a vast excess of sound over sense, a prodigality of words with do not so much express
as conceal the poet's meaning. (699)
In the face of such charges, it is worth noting that Swinburne had mastered highly
concentrated and compact forms such as the sonnet and the roundel.
In 1884 Swinburne published
A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems, which included poems of landscapes and seascapes, political verse, and of course
more elegies.
Poems and Ballads, Third Series, published in 1889, included
To a Seamew, Pan and Thalassius, Neap-Tide, elegies for
Sir Henry Taylor and
John William Inchbold, and a number of border ballads originally intended for
Lesbia Brandon, Swinburne's unfinished novel.
Drama, Prose Fiction, and Criticism
This introduction has focused on Swinburne's poetry. Swinburne's six-volume collected
Poems, published in 1904, was followed in 1905 the five-volume Tragedies of Algernon Charles Swinburne. The dramas include: Queen Mother; Rosamond; the Mary Stuart trilogy: Chastelard, Bothwell, and Mary Stuart; Locrine; The Sisters; Marino Faliero; and Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards. The fragmentary Duke of Gandia was published later in 1908. With the exception of The Sisters, a blank-verse drama with a contemporary nineteenth-century setting, these are all
tragedies on historical or legendary figures and bear the strong influence of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama to which Swinburne was so devoted. Swinburne's dramas
have generally been considered unsuccessful. They are long and dense and complex.
Swinburne had an intimate and comprehensive knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama. In fact, Swinburne, perhaps the most widely read of English poets, considered
Charles Lamb's selections from Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists to be among the
two most influential books in the vast canon of literature that Swinburne knew so
intimately. As Gosse reports in his Life, while looking over Gosse's bookshelves, Swinburne selected a copy of Lamb's Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets, and, turning to Gosse, said, That book taught me more than any other in the world—that and the Bible. Writing in his autobiography, Henry Adams comments at length on Swinburne and on
his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediaeval, and modern; his
faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward,
from end to beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo (140). Thus a full appreciation and understanding of Swinburne's dramas (and other
works) requires a familiarity with the literary past and the many literary traditions
within which Swinburne worked. It would have been difficult for many nineteenth-century
readers to match Swinburne's literary knowledge, and it is more difficult for modern
readers who are often never exposed to many of the authors and works that held such
sway over Swinburne.
Swinburne was also a prolific and influential critic. Swinburne wrote shorter essays
on Hugo, Byron, Shelley, Arnold, D. G. Rossetti, Morris, Coleridge, John Ford, Congreve,
Collins, Wordsworth, Lamb, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Emily Brontë, Chaucer, Spenser,
Charles Reade, Walter Scott, Benjamin Jowett, John Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher,
Wilkie Collins, Whitman, and others. He also wrote essays on art that influenced figures
such as Pater and Wilde. Swinburne's shorter essays were gathered in the collections
Essays and Studies (1875), Miscellanies (1886), and Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894). He also wrote several book-length critical works: William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868), George Chapman: A Critical Essay (1875), A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877), A Study of Ben Jonson (1889), A Study of Shakespeare (1880), and A Study of Victor Hugo (1886).
Matthew Arnold found Swinburne to be a sensitive and insightful critic of Arnold's
own works. After reading Swinburne's essay Mr. Arnold's New Poems, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review 8, (Oct. 1867), Arnold wrote in a letter to Francis Turner Palgrave:
Swinburne fairly took my breath away. I must say the general public praise me in the
dubious style in which old Wordsworth used to praise Bernard Barton, James Montgomery,
and suchlike; and the writers of poetry, on the other hand—Browning, Swinburne, Lytton—praise
me as the general public praises its favourites. This is a curious reversal of the
usual order of things. Perhaps it is from an exaggerated estimate of my own unpopularity
and obscurity as a poet, but my first impulse is to be astonished at Swinburne's praising
me, and to think it an act of generosity. Also he picks passages which I myself should
have picked, and which I have not seen other people pick.
Twentieth-century poet and critic T. S. Eliot opens his essay Swinburne as Critic with an acknowledgement of the signficiance of Swinburne's criticism and Swinburne's
mastery of his subjects:
Three conclusions at least issue from the perusal of Swinburne's critical essays:
Swinburne had mastered his material, was more inward with the Tudor-Stuart dramatists
than any man of pure letters before or since; he is a more reliable guide to them
than Hazlitt, Coleridge, or Lamb; and his perception of relative values is almost
always correct. Against these merits we may oppose two objections: the style is the
prose style of Swinburne, and the content is not, in an exact sense, criticism. The
faults of style are, of course, personal; the tumultuous outcry of adjectives, the
headstrong rush of undisciplined sentences, are the index to the impatience and perhaps
laziness of a disorderly mind. But the style has one positive merit: it allows us
to know that Swinburne was writing not to establish a critical reputation, not to
instruct a docile public, but as a poet his notes upon poets whom he admired. And
whatever our opinion of Swinburne's verse, the notes upon poets by a poet of Swinburne's
dimensions must be read with attention and respect. (17)
Future editions of The Swinburne Project will incorporate texts of Swinburne's dramas and prose criticism.