Catherine Maxwell

Not every contribution of equal interest of course, but bumping up to 5 stars simply for this book being there: new thought on Swinburne that does not owe to stupid old ideas -- Swinburne in the age of queer theory instead of the sexual unease disguised as criticism that dogged him in his time and well into the twentieth century. We can appreciate him now, right, and not apologise for him? After all, I cannot consign him to 'adolescent' predilections when I am re-reading Poems and Ballads, First Series and thinking better of them than I did as a teenager: understanding and seeing more in them, even if teenage intoxication is gone.

Swinburne was poet, critic and scholar (this triumvirate challenging TS Eliot, it is argued in here, on his own turf, so that he pushed aside Swinburne in anxiety): his studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, William Blake, Baudelaire and Gautier, being as innovative and readable as his poetry. This book seeks to cover Swinburne in all his roles, as well as Swinburne early and late (he suffered from being rescued from an early death, but the 'early and late' legend is exaggerated; I cannot think it a pity he survived).

A couple of highlights:
Charlotte Ribeyrol on Swinburne as Hellene: but for Greeks of the margins, dark Greece, to cut against the nineteenth century cult of a clean, white, rational Greek heritage. Gilbert Murray and Jane Harrison used his vision.

Sarah Parker on Sappho, Swinburne and Amy Lowell. Sappho was Swinburne's muse; although he worshipped Baudelaire, you see a giant step from the French poet's grotesque lesbians to Swinburne, who was the first to portray Sappho explicitly as lesbian (and not grossly). I am beyond delighted to learn that several queer women writers of the early twentieth century found his poetry 'enabling'. Lowell, her body, her sexuality and her poetry subject to caricature by the same kind of people as caricatured Swinburne -- Eliot, Anglo-Catholic and too Tory for the Tory party; Ezra Pound, actual fascist -- was one of these.

Also: the lyric disguised in the dramatic of 'Anactoria', with reference to Browning; his mutual esteem, across the divide of religious views, with Christina Rosetti; Swinburne as a broker of French culture, in a cosmopolitanism of outsiders as against Matthew Arnold.… (mehr)