?A Sword of a Song?: Swinburne's Republican Aesthetics inSongs before Sunrise

Abstract

Algernon Charles Swinburne composed Songs before Sunrise (1871) as "lyrics for the crusade" of Italian and worldwide republicanism. In doing so, he placed himself within a radical literary tradition that included not only canonical figures such as William Blake and Percy Shelley but also little-known working-class poets such as W. J. Linton and Gerald Massey. This tradition, which I call "republican aesthetics," developed as radical writers began to envision poetry as an agent of social and political change and as they attempted to translate republican ideals, especially their dedication to equality, into poetic form. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, republicans came to believe that what Blake called the "mind-forg'd manacles" of ideological oppression supported the brute force of the state, and that poetry had a unique ability to sever these manacles ("London" 8). Formal strategies designed to "cleanse the doors of perception" (Marriage of Heaven and Hell Plate 14) were at once the poetic expression of republican philosophy and a weapon in the war against "priestcraft" and "kingcraft." Swinburne articulated his understanding of this poetic theory, and placed himself within his "church of rebels," in two main texts (William Blake 55). The first is William Blake (1868), both a critical biography and a manifesto of radical poetics, in which Swinburne describes republican verse as the "fusion" of the political and artistic "senses." The second is Songs before Sunrise, which puts radical aesthetics into practice, enacting the power of poetry to "break and melt in sunder" the "clouds and chains" that bind the "eyes, hands, and spirits" of humanity ("Eve of Revolution" 145-47).