Swinburne

Abstract

Swinburne Adam Mazel (bio) Swinburne scholarship was relatively quiet this past year; only four essay-length studies will be reviewed in this article. These studies form two themes. Three of the four consider Swinburne’s poetry comparatively, using his verse as a foil to highlight the works of contemporaries and successors who were influenced by but also diverged from Swinburne. The other focus is on examining Swinburne’s ekphrastic poetry in relation to gender norms. Howard J. Booth examines D. H. Lawrence’s derivation and deviation from Swinburne in “‘The Woodland Whose Depths and Whose Heights Were Pan’s’: Swinburne and Lawrence, Decadence and Modernism,” in Decadence in the Age of Modernism, edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2019). This essay shows that Lawrence’s well-known desire to suture Cartesian dichotomies, such as humanity and nature, emerged from Swinburne’s similar goal, particularly as expressed in such later poems as his 1894 “A Nympholept” and its classical motifs of Pan and nympholepsy, among other mythological tropes. But while Swinburne influenced and was greatly admired by Lawrence, an esteem that was rare among Modernist writers, Lawrence also transcended Swinburne in order to advance his anti-Cartesian aspirations further. Lawrence extends and goes beyond Swinburne’s classical images, loosens his tightly wrought forms, and rethinks his traditional gender relations, making Lawrence, for Booth, the more forward thinking of the two authors. Swinburne’s poetry is also treated comparatively in Julie Casanova’s “Gender and Chronotopes of Revolution in the Border Ballads of Swinburne and Marriott Watson” (VP 57, no. 2 [2019]: 177–199), which argues that the two titular poets have an overlooked poetic relationship. Specifically, Casanova claims Swinburne’s border ballad, “A Song in Time of Revolution, 1860,” from Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866), is critically revised by Rosamund Marriott Watson’s border ballad, “The Quern of the Giants,” from Vespertilia and Other Verses (1895). Marriott Watson’s representation of time and space, for Casanova, is a radical feminist corrective of Swinburne’s representation, which theorizes time and space in a patriarchal and conservative manner, an [End Page 376] argument that Casanova makes via the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope. The poetic form of “A Song in Time of Revolution, 1860,” like many of Swinburne’s poems, is regular and repetitive, and thus it characteristically envisions time as circular, a temporality that Casanova claims is masculinist. “The Quern of the Giants,” on the other hand, employs more metrical variation, which enacts time as more disturbed and disruptive and which, for Casanova, evokes not only revolution but also what she calls the “uncanny feminine” (p. 179). Likewise, Swinburne’s border ballad progressively omits persons to focus on nature, disempowering human agency, whereas Marriott Watson’s ever more focuses on female forces of disruption, a way of undoing masculinist hegemony. Ultimately, then, Swinburne’s ballad is adjudged by Casanova to be conservative and patriarchal; Marriott Watson’s radical and feminist, marking her, for Casanova, as the greater poet. The strength of this essay is its analyses of the form and content of the two poems, but its argument would benefit from further evidence that Marriott Watson’s border ballad is actually a response to Swinburne’s. The final comparative study is Dominique Gracia’s “‘The one question is not what you mean but what you do’: Michael Field’s Ekphrastic Verse” (VP 57, no. 3 [2019]: 345–364). This essay contrasts each of Swinburne’s ekphrastic poems, “A Cameo,” “Hermaphroditus,” and “Before the Mirror,” from Poems and Ballads, First Series, against Michael Field’s ekphrastic “Saint Katharine of Alexandria, by Bartolommeo Veneto,” “Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus,” and “A Portrait, by Bartolommeo Veneto,” from Sight and Song (1892), respectively. Swinburne’s ekphrastic verse, Gracia shows, emphasizes song over sight, suggestion over description, subjectivity over objectivity. Thus, it proves an apt foil for Sight and Song, which Gracia shows does just the opposite, more often prioritizing sight over song by conventionally providing an accurate, detailed description of the art object. Only in “A Portrait” did Michael Field diverge from the artwork being described and thus approach Swinburne’s more experimental, transformative style of ekphrasis. This is...