Algernon Swinburne 1837-1909: an Overview of His Life and Poetry

1 Algernon Swinburne 1837-1909: An Overview of His Life and Poetry BY Garry Victor Hill Revised and Expanded Edition Frisky Press Armidale Australia 2016 2 Contents Copyright and Disclaimer page 3 Dedication page 4 Introduction to the Second Edition page 5 Part One: Algernon Swinburne page 6 Chapter One The Formative Years 1837-1862 page 7 Chapter Two Fame 1862-1879 page 55 Chapter Three A New Man 1879-1909 page 97 Part Two: The Poems page 137 Works Cited page 406 Author’s Note page 410 About the Author page 412 3 Copyright and Disclaimer Copyright © The text written by the author may be quoted from for purposes of study or review if proper acknowledgement is made. Communication on this would be appreciated. Selling copies becomes another matter and cannot be permitted. The author has taken pictures from the Public Domain, The Gutenberg Project, Wikipedia and Wikimedia and Wikiart as they appear on the internet. This has been done by the requested method of giving requested feedback, asking permission for use and only then copying once into the text. If anyone finds that a picture they hold copyright to has been put on the internet in these sources without their knowledge, contact the author and it will be removed or personal acknowledgement will be given in wording of the owner’s choice. No money has been made from any illustration. The author cannot give copyright permission on illustrations. Swinburne’s poems have been put in the public domain and so have been reproduced here. 4 Dedication To John Harwood Novelist, biographer, lecturer 5 Introduction to the Second Edition This book cannot be a full biography because it cannot be a comprehensive examination of Swinburne’s writings. He was an extraordinarily prolific writer, but an extremely unsystematic cataloguer of his work. Over a hundred years after his death large numbers of newly found works and writings are still turning up. This makes a final assessment of his work impossible. Another problem with writing comprehensively about Swinburne must be that he worked voluminously in different fields: poetry, plays, essays, controversies and correspondence. This work only touches on some of these other fields as his poetry must be the focus. What is attempted here can only be an overview of his poetic output. Even the supposedly complete collection of his poetry put together in 1904 consisted of four fat volumes - and these gained similar companions in 1911 and 1917, with others following in a second attempt at his complete works in the second half of the 1920s. Many other poems have been added to the Swinburne canon since then. So how to select from this massive collection in a way that will give an overview? Obviously many of the works that have gained great fame and are considered his best must be included. Less obvious are the works which for various reasons, while they are of high quality were little known, underrated or unpublished. These deserve attention. Others are the type editors of a writer’s poetry usually avoid – the rightfully lesser known and those that are distasteful. In itself there is nothing wrong with producing collections which avoid such works - if such collections have titles that make that clear, titles such as The Best of Swinburne’s Poetry, or Swinburne: The Great Poems, The poems collected here include the great, the good the bad and the ugly and even the terrible. This expanded edition contains many typo corrections, a few expansions and rewordings. Works such as ‘Tiresias,’ ‘Genesis’ ‘In the Orchid’ ‘Loch Torridon’ ‘In Memory of John William Inchbold’ and his Jacobite persona poems have been added. Of course the second section of this book, the actual poems is the big change to the first edition. This reproduces most of the poems referred to in the first section and does so roughly in the order that they appear in the first, so that readers can make up their own minds. 6 Part One Algernon Swinburne 7 Chapter One The formative Years 1837-1862 “Algernon Swinburne” - those words conjure up an image of Victorian era aestheticism, of an aristocrat who was an intellectual elitist. He appears as a man not so much controlling common life, but remote from it. The popular image remains of a socially rebellious bohemian almost totally outside of both politics and his contemporary reality. Instead of social involvement Swinburne supposedly lived in an inchoate rebellion. His outrageous life flaunted the common Victorian concepts of duty, heroic virtue, puritanism and conformity. Actually this libertine pondered upon the nature of death, the meaning of life and the purpose of existence more than most puritanical bishops. Many of his poems written in old age would have been good for patriotic sing-alongs in 8 officers’ messes throughout the British Empire. Initially his intellectual life seems almost totally absorbed in both the history and mythology of the ancient world, and also British and Scottish legends and remote European history. For many his way of life led to him creating sensual, dramatic poetry based in mythic archetypes and historic narratives. This common image seems to some extent assumed due to his years spent with the Pre-Raphaelites and then the aesthetes. This impression gains reinforcement by reading his best known, most critically successful, and enduring works, most notably: 'Dolores' (1862) ‘Anactoria’ (1862) ‘Sapphics’ (1865) ‘Atalanta in Calydon' (1865) ‘Faustine’ (1866) ‘Stage Love’ (1866) 'Hymn to Proserpine' (1866) ‘The Garden of Proserpine' (1866) ‘Hertha’ (1871) ‘On the Downs’ (1871) ‘A Forsaken Garden’ (1876) ‘Ave Atque Vale' (1878) 'Tristram of Lyonesse' (1882) ‘The Lake of Gaube’ (1894) The fact that these works are often in reprints, selected editions of his works, or anthologies show that his revived reputation rests on a smallish proportion of his work. Even so, these works now have a strong reputation. Biographies and Swinburne studies appear fairly regularly. In the world of the internet, a world so totally different from the one he created in these poems, scholars and admirers have now created websites such as The Algernon Swinburne Project. This website’s creators aim to contain all of his writings. They also include a biography, a detailed chronology and an introduction to his work. There are also other collections of his writings on the net with the Project Gutenberg being one of the most notable. The website Poem.hunter, which lists poets and poems of the world, usually rates him as being around number 150 to 165 on the popular list of the world's best 600 poets. Poem.hunter also contains many of his poems. He was also a prolific playwright, essayist, letter writer and occasional 9 novelist, but remains best known as a poet and his poetry must be the focus of this work. To gain a more accurate concept of Swinburne's poetic output, several other poems apart from the most famous should be considered. There are other reasons for examining some of these lesser known, but not always lesser works. Swinburne was also a great poet outside of the better known classical and Pre- Raphaelite genres, often creating great poetry when he wrote about landscapes, the sea and sometimes when writing about his contemporaries. The fallacy that after retiring to Putney in 1879 he was virtually a tame prisoner who wrote little or nothing worthwhile needs reconsideration. Regrettably, much of Swinburne's lesser known, lower quality poetry also demonstrates how politics, duty, morality and hero worship if they become an artist's inspiration, can weaken an artist's abilities. In an introduction to a Swinburne anthology the editor, Lawrence Binyon stated succinctly what took many a book to say: that Swinburne was a genius; true enough, but Binyon then goes on to do what every writer on Swinburne must do, to discuss the strange, erratic nature of that genius.1 He also correctly states that Swinburne wrote so much that difficulties arise in selecting what is worthwhile.2 After six thick volumes made up the 1904 Collected Works, another volume emerged in 1917 and more in 1926. In 1964 Syracuse University Press published a collection of works New Writings By Swinburne edited by Cecil Y. Lang, who commented that the unpublished works by Swinburne might equal what was in print.3 Three more poems found in the 1990s, were included in Rooksby’s The Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne. Selecting from this mass those that are most worthwhile becomes problematic. Many of these later works are pathetic and distasteful: others are as worthwhile as anything he wrote. Swinburne's output shows that how genius can retreat, advance, vanish and make a comeback. Scattered among his great works were others that were puerile, pathetic, sadistic, overblown, sycophantic, hagiographic, trite, jingoistic, and boring. In his complete poetic output well over fifty poems could be easily placed in one or more of these categories. Three of his friends warned him in different ways that a massive amount of unvarying quantity was not making his reputation. The artist Burne-Jones wisely advised Swinburne that he should write less as poetic repetition was ruining him.4 As early as 1866 William Michael Rossetti, another stalwart 1 Lawrence Binyon, The Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Ware; Wordsworth Editions, 1995. Introduction, pv. 2 Ibid, pvii-viii. 3 Cecil Y. Lang reproduces this article in New Writings By Swinburne: Being A Medley of Poems, Critical Essays, Hoaxes and Burlesques. Syracuse N.Y.; Syracuse University Press, 1964. Preface pix 4 Burne-Jones quoted by John Christian, ‘Speaking of Kisses in Paradise: Burne-Jones’s Friendship with Swinburne.’ The Journal of the Morris Society.

Load more