[Rose Kelleher]

I have a deep, dark confession to make: sometimes, when the moon is full and my medication wears off, I like Swinburne. There are a couple of Swinburne threads in Mastery, but they were about specific poems and didn't go very far.

I'd never heard of him before I started poking around in online workshops and saw "Swinburnian" used as a derogatory term for overly poetical, flowery, archaic, long-winded poetry. It seemed as if everyone -- from the hip, opaque poets to the Garrison Keillor types -- was in agreement on this one thing: that Swinburne was the exact opposite of what contemporary poetry should be. Naturally, this aroused my curiosity.

His Poems & Ballads, which I've been (slowly) working my way through, so outraged Victorian critics that his publisher was forced to withdraw it from circulation. That alone is reason enough to like him. Afterwards, in defense of his publisher, Swinburne wrote a pamphlet in which he denied his poems were about homosexuality or sadomasochism or anything else considered "indecent or blasphemous" and accused his critics of having dirty minds. Of course this was baloney, but he expressed himself with so much wit and defiance that you have to smile. Here's an excerpt:

"The first, it appears, of these especially horrible poems is Anactoria. I am informed, and have not cared to verify the assertion, that this poem has excited, among the chaste and candid critics of the day or hour or minute, a more vehement reprobation, a more virtuous horror, a more passionate appeal, than any other of my writing. Proud and glad as I must be of this distinction, I must yet, however reluctantly, inquire what merit or demerit has incurred such unexpected honour."

Evasive, but still, considering the times, brave. Remember what happened to Oscar Wilde. But enough about his character. I meant to say a few words in defense of his poetry, or at least in defense of some of it.

First of all, what an ear! Pick any stanza of any poem of his at random, and read it aloud. Lilting, sweeping, rhythmic, fluid music. Recently I tried to write something in his style, and let me tell you, he's not easy to imitate. I don't mean snide parody, but respectful imitation. He was an uncompromising metrist (and by that I do not mean rigidly regular) with great respect for the line (by which I do not mean he never enjambed), and amazingly deft with alliteration and anaphora. Poe defined poetry as "the rhythmical creation of beauty in words," but Swinburne was better at it.

Here's a stanza I just opened to at random, from To Victor Hugo :

Yea, he is strong, thou say'st,
A mystery many-faced,
The wild beasts know him and the wild birds flee;
The blind night sees him, death
Shrinks beaten at his breath,
And his right hand is heavy on the sea:
We know he hath made us, and is king;
We know not if he care for anything.

And, just to see if it works again, here's another stanza, picked totally at random, from Ilicet :

There is not one thing with another,
But Evil saith to Good: My brother,
My brother, I am one with thee:
They shall not strive nor cry for ever:
No man shall choose between them: never
Shall this thing end and that thing be.

But that's the easy part: everyone knows Swinburne sounded good. The problem, according to his modern critics, is that he was extremely (as Maz would say) "poetickal." And he was. But after reading a lot of relentlessly un-poetical contemporary poetry, a little Swinburnian flamboyance can hit the spot. He didn't go into the mundane details of, say, packing a suitcase, and try to extrapolate meaning or beauty from that. He talked a lot about God, goddesses, red flowers, good and evil, blood, sex and death. You know, fun stuff. And he questioned a lot of assumptions. In the stanzas above, he's questioning whether God cares about His creations, and questioning the binary nature of good and evil. Today that may seem unremarkable, the stuff of adolescent poetry. But in his day, in his culture, that was a big deal.

Okay, you say, but he padded his verse with a lot of fluff in service to the form. And he may have done that to an extent, but I suspect he's not quite as guilty of it as people say. I noticed when I was reading Dolores that the notes were pretty extensive. He made a lot of allusions, which is why, as I mentioned earlier, it's taking me so long to read his stuff. Take this stanza:

O garment not golden but gilded,
O garden where all men may dwell,
O tower not of ivory, but builded
By hands that reach heaven from hell;
O mystical rose of the mire,
O house not of gold but of gain,
O house of unquenchable fire,
Our Lady of Pain!

Now, call me dumb, but if it weren't for the notes, I'd never have known that this alludes to the Loreto Litany of the Blessed Virgin. I'd have thought these were just fanciful images he came up with on his own. But they're not fluff; every one of those images is meaningful. In his pamphlet, he's able to pull off his disingenuous defense of his poems because they're so allusive and layered. "Dolores" can be seen as an ode to an abstract anti-madonna or to an employee of a London flagellation brothel. Either way it's a fun read.

The other problem, people say, is that Swinburne was long-winded. Ahem. The accepted wisdom today is that a poem should say what it has to say in as few words as possible, and say it only once. Swinburne rhapsodized, chanted, explored a single theme in a dozen different ways. There's something to be said for chanting. The rhythm itself adds meaning and emotion, building on itself, like a chant at a protest rally, or a drum solo, or saying a rosary as opposed to a single Hail Mary.

Another factor may be that Swinburne often used anapestic meter and compound rhymes like "Dolores / adore is," and those are often associated with light verse. But that's rather arbitrary, isn't it?

I googled, and according to at least one Internet source, Frost was an admirer of Swinburne. A. E. Housman harshly criticized him, but praised his rhyming ability and imitated his "rhythms." Strangely, Pound supposedly liked him, at least for a while. Other admirers reportedly included Hardy, Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Faulkner. Okay, so that's not a very long list. I'm grasping at straws.

It would be easy for everyone to respond by posting examples of Swinburne's worst poetry as proof that the consensus is right and his life's work was indeed worthless. I humbly suggest that that would not be the best use of our time, and propose instead that people post and discuss poems or sections of poems of his that they find genuinely interesting. But do what you have to do.



[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited June 19, 2006).]