Swinburne

Abstract

Swinburne Justin A. Sider (bio) At the end of Ezra Pound's querulous review of Edmund Gosse's biography of Algernon Charles Swinburne, he concludes his own portrait of the poet—alternately admiring and exasperated—with this summary: "At any rate we can, whatever our verbal fastidiousness, be thankful for any man who kept alive some spirit of paganism and of revolt in a papier-mâché era, in a time swarming with Longfellows, Mabies, Gosses, Harrisons."1 "Paganism" and "revolt" are [End Page 403] watchwords for the small run of Swinburne scholarship this past year, a set of essays and chapters that sees our poet lending Aleister Crowley the formulae for versified sex "magick," pondering the limits of rational thought, and celebrating the erosion of the human world. Though the number of essays and chapters was small, these cover a fair range of the field's current interests. In the introduction to Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910: Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), Dennis Denisoff turns to Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866)—"the main catalyst for literature having a voice in the formulation of British decadence" (p. 12)—in order to show how the era's decadent paganism produced an "expansive conceptualization of ecological reality" (p. 19). Victorian critics like Robert Buchanan (Thomas Maitland) had themselves described the "fleshly" poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne in ecological terms–as a biological threat to the moral health of the nation. Yet decadent writing, Denisoff argues, did not offer straightforward rebellion against "an artificial image of a stable society" but pursued instead images of "mutation, excess, and inconstancy" that joined human and nonhuman worlds: "Like biological decay, decadent culture is not a threat but an inherent aspect of an open ecology" (p. 11). In Denisoff's readings, paganism and decadence collaborate in portraying a world of "indeterminate, open . . . relationships" within which human beings are merely one set of coordinates rather than an organizing center (p. 19). Swinburne's neopaganism (represented, in this case, by "Hertha" and "The Garden of Proserpine") is treated rather briefly. Denisoff notes that Swinburne challenged the rigid moral vision of Victorian society by celebrating pagan divinities like the eponymous Hertha, who represents a "timeless" and "ongoing" force without being "tied to a narrative of progression and improvement" (p. 14). Denisoff devotes more attention to "The Leper," which he contextualizes with Victorian essays and poems on fungus and disease, drawing out the tendency in the era to represent decay not as a natural force but as a hostile (moral) agent. Against such habits of thought, "The Leper" exemplifies the perspective of decadent ecology by "contrasting the common impulse to shun the other—whether deemed abject, sickly, foreign, or unnatural—with the decadent drive for appreciative incorporation" (p. 19). Though Swinburne appears primarily to introduce the preoccupations of the book as a whole, Denisoff's discussion suggests the richness of Swinburne's work for ecocritical approaches to Victorian poetry and decadence. Swinburne's ecological imagination is also the focus of Keri Stevenson's "The Death of Birdsong, the Birdsong of Death: Algernon Charles Swinburne [End Page 404] and the Horror of Erosion" (in Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, ed. Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles [University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 2021], pp. 91–109). Stevenson treats the eroding landscapes in "A Forsaken Garden" and "By the North Sea" as examples of what Greg Garrard calls "disanthropic" literature—that is, literature that imagines a world without humans. The challenge or paradox of artistic disanthropy, Stevenson explains, involves forgetting that any such representation of the world is itself a human product, arranged and designed for our consumption. Stevenson's readings of Swinburne's poems explore the strategies by which he works through this challenge. Erosion is the principal figure here because Swinburne strives to render landscapes "free of the colonization of human minds and needs": "There is nothing here humans can use, want, name, or eat," writes Stevenson of Swinburne's gardens and seashores (p. 97). Conventional poetic images—birdsong, flowers, and trees—are offered not in the redemptive mode of pastoral. Rather, these objects survive our...