Swinburne and Tennyson's Peerage

Abstract

Algernon Charles Swinburne's poetic relations with Alfred Tennyson were mostly respectful. Where Swinburne differed, he still acknowledged the abilities of the Poet Laureate. There is one major exception: Swinburne's violent reaction—never noticed before—to Tennyson's acceptance of a barony in 1883. This article explores Swinburne's response and assesses the rich tangle of public and private reasons beyond the poet's well-known republican hatred of the House of Lords. What emerges is a cultural moment when the question of Swinburne's identity as a political poet and English culture's understanding of how politics and poetry were related at the end of the nineteenth century became luminously visible. What also emerges are the striking, conflicted ways in which Swinburne's personal feelings about political verse were inextricable from his private regard for class.