Swinburne among the Hexametrists

Abstract

In Dedicatory Epistle with which he prefaced first volume of his Collected Poems in 1904, A. C. Swinburne laid down law about poetic form. Law, he proclaimed, lawlessness, is natural condition of poetic life; but law must itself be poetic and not pedantic, natural and not conventional. (1) This pronouncement asserts that poets are subject to some kind of law, a striking claim to make about very poems that had shocked reading public four decades earlier by violating poetic and social taboos. But Swinburne then qualifies claim, invoking a Romantic tradition in which both law and poetry, two presumably conventional things, are alike natural. He insists paradoxically that law must bow to poetry, thing that it is supposed to govern. At very moment that he invokes law, conjuring its existence for his reader, he also commands it, setting forth strictures about what it must do or, rather, what it must be. My main goal here, in exploring this paradoxical attitude, is to consider way Swinburne's poetry and criticism together contribute to a larger nineteenth-century discourse in which poets, critics, and metrists sought to work out laws of English verse both in theory and through practice. Unlike Kirstie Blair and Jason Rudy, who align Swinburne with a somatic or physiological understanding of meter, I pursue a less materialist approach here. (2) I argue that Swinburne's implicit metrical theory relies on a concept of law that extends, for him, from poetics to politics. Though my approach is primarily formal and contextual, I claim that for Swinburne form has wider implications. More specifically, concept of law that grounds his poetic theory derives in part from politics he espoused, while also gratifying masochistic sexuality that his most recent biographer has characterized as rooted in his temperament. (3) In Swinburne scholarship, commitments and sexual investments have generally been regarded as at odds with each other. Critics often proceed either by emphasizing oppositional potentialities of his sexual politics at expense of his republicanism or--less often--by isolating republicanism from eroticism. Richard Dellamora, in his study of Swinburne's sexual politics, dismisses explicitly political, Songs before Sunrise (1871), successor to Poems and Ballads (1866), as disappointing. (4) Isobel Armstrong, responding primarily to Atalanta in Calydcm (1865) and Poems and Ballads, similarly argues that the real political centre ... is in poetry of desire, consuming, exhausting desire, which needs to be ever stimulated and ever expanded. (5) More recently, Stephanie Kuduk Weiner has turned to Songs before Sunrise in her study of Swinburne as a poet, defending book's as well as political value by arguing that its poems enact formally aesthetic that they articulate. (6) Julia F. Saville's account of Swinburne as a cosmopolitan republican stands as an exception to this tendency to cordon off commitments from eroticism, particularly in her superb reading of Les Noyades. (7) I wish to bring these aspects of his work together at level of poetic theory and form. I return to Poems and Ballads, which does not form a part of Kuduk's analysis, and to criticism Swinburne wrote in 1860s, to argue that his prosodic theory and practice are partly grounded in his politics, represented by his admiration for Giuseppe Mazzini. I trace implicit connections between political, aesthetic, and erotic in poems that experiment with some form of hexameter and in criticism in which he comments on prosodical matters. What interests me is way Swinburne's ideas about poetics, expressed in his criticism and enacted in his poetic practice, are inflected by both his political and his erotic investments. …