<em>A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work</em>, edited by Yisrael Levin

Abstract

Reviewed by: A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work Veronica Alfano (bio) A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work, edited by Yisrael Levin; pp. x + 190. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, £55.00, $99.95. In his essay “Swinburne as Poet,” published in The Sacred Wood (1920), T. S. Eliot infamously declares that A. C. Swinburne’s sonically lush verse consists of sound divorced from sense. His poetry remains, despite its beauty, a “mere hallucination of meaning” ([Faber, 1997], 127). It is this influential proclamation that A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word, a tremendously useful and provocative essay collection edited by Yisrael Levin, seeks to challenge. In the process of combating the notion that Swinburne’s poetry is entrancingly incantatory near-nonsense, the volume is also largely successful [End Page 753] in disproving another critical truism: that Swinburne did his most important work early in his career, and that his 1879 move to Putney with his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton effectively signaled the end of his creative efflorescence. Levin explains that scholars who would draw attention to Swinburne’s often-neglected later work will do well to employ a mode of meticulous reading that, while not downplaying cultural and historical factors in a New Critical manner, focuses on unfolding the “conceptual and rhetorical complexities” of this verse (6). David G. Riede’s afterword cannily notes that champions of Swinburne must prove that “the overwhelming sound” of his early and late poetry alike “does not negate but includes and transcends rational meaning” (171); in the end, “the sound is the sense, both physiologically and intellectually” (176). Accordingly, A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word uses close attention to form to offer new perspectives on sound in Swinburne’s mature poems. With this objective in mind, Stephanie Kuduk Weiner’s excellent “Knowledge and Sense Experience in Swinburne’s Late Poetry” is a highly effective opening essay and one of the volume’s most persuasive pieces. In a series of ingenious readings, Weiner shows the ways in which several of Swinburne’s formally experimental works explore the relationship between sensation and knowledge. She demonstrates that “sonorousness and sound repetition [are] a path to insight” in these poems and associates Swinburne with an empiricist rather than a transcendentalist epistemology, deftly grounding his verse in Victorian intellectual history (22). For Swinburne, Weiner proposes, form and sound inevitably constitute meaning. John A. Walsh, in “‘Quivering Web of Living Thought’: Conceptual Networks in Swinburne’s Songs of the Springtides,” points toward a similar conclusion using a very different approach. Arguing convincingly that digitization of Swinburne’s 1880 volume allows for a precise and powerful way of reading—for it reveals that this collection is a carefully structured “information network” composed of reiterated “concepts, symbols, and tropes” (31)—he implies that a meaningful architectonic method emerges from the musically iterative madness of Songs of the Springtides (which delights in repeating and varying the alliteratively linked language of, for instance, “sea” and “sing” and “song”). Walsh’s essay will be most helpful and congenial to those who understand the technical details he provides about his strategies for digitally encoding Swinburne’s poems. Levin’s contribution, “Solar Erotica: Swinburne’s Myth of Creation,” shows the poet replacing the Judeo-Christian creation story with a subversively sexualized origin myth through (for example) alternation between energetic short lines and languid long lines that mirror “the build-up of sexual tension and its release” (59). Levin’s extended readings of “Hertha” (1871), “Off Shore” (1880), and especially “By the North Sea” (1880) adroitly map out coherent narratives in poems that might initially appear to privilege sonic patterning and rampant-yet-unanchored erotic imagery above lucid sense-making. Elsewhere, in essays that tend to engage less intimately with the linguistic details of Swinburne’s verse, the collection shifts its focus to issues of national and regional influence and identity. Brian Burton’s absorbing and innovative “Swinburne and the North” uses the poet’s ballad imitations and medieval saga The Tale of Balen (1896) to investigate his construction of a quasi-Northumbrian selfhood. Burton is chiefly concerned with Swinburne’s techniques of...