He is a good one to put down, don't be dissuaded by my own personal antics - I have a knack for ruining things for others, don't worry about what I say - take everything with a grain of salt, - though, I thought you were going to go with Modern American Theatre - you changed your mind? Just, I think, when you are selecting poets, don't try to pick all the cliché ones.Originally Posted by kelby_lake
I was just planning on doing a line on poetry- I think the image at the end of A Foresaken Garden- in fact the whole poem- is quite theatrical, which is why I like itI sort of like Keats and Byron and Shelley but they are the epitome of obvious poets.
I love his "A Leave-Taking". A beautiful, moving poem.
Worked really well in 'Long Day's Journey Into Night'
Swinburne was a very wild youth indeed and nearly killed himself with drink, drugs and masochistic sexual excess. Then he was taken in hand by someone called, I think, Watts-Dunton, who took him in and allowed him just one bottle of Bass daily... to obtain which he had to walk across Putney Heath to the only pub that would serve him anything, Watts-Dunton having warned all the others not to, and this one to set the one-bottle limit.
Sadly this life-preserving regime took the fire out of Swinburne's poetry, and after submitting to it he became a sober and quite dull man of letters.
So what you want to read are the early poems, imo. These were published in a book called 'Poems and Ballads'. There was a later 'Poems and Ballads Vol 2', but what you want is the first volume, which in early editions is just called 'Poems and Ballads', and later has 'Vol 1' added to the title. You can get them pretty cheap secondhand, it went through loads of editions, being a Victorian succes de scandale. This is the one with 'Garden of Proserpine' and other wonders. It contains poems sometimes boldly atheist or frankly sexual, always a little wild and beautifully musical. Personally I find that in this collection the music almost never takes over from meaning, and I have always loved my copy of 'Poems and Ballads Vol 1'.
I think it is a great sign that a student loves Swinburne, because it means they have an ear for the music of poetry, and they know how gloriously outrageous poetry can be, and are ready to be open to that.
I love the image of death self-slain at the end of A Foresaken Garden
Me too - he knows how to stitch lines together, and into your memory. i think I have quite a few lines stored up (probably inaccurately)...
"Thou hast conquered O pale Galilean
And the world has grown pale from thy breath"
- pretty challenging for an early Victorian, and actually maybe a little shrill. Swinburne is often shrill. But I don't mind!
"Here, where the world is quiet
Here, where all trouble seems
dead winds and spent waves' riot
in doubtful dreams of dreams"
That's 'Garden of Proserpine' isn't it? 'Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea' is the most comforting atheistic description of death I know! Not actually that far away from Tennyson's 'Crossing the Bar' though, which is not atheistical, which shows how poetry frees itself from the constraints of dogma. Maybe?
I often think of Tennyson when reading Swinburne. He's like Tennyson's dark secret self (or his no-good half-brother). The music is similar though it does take over swooningly sometimes in Swinburne. And I don't mind that either!
'And all the world is bitter as a tear...'
Love it
He liked a bit of S and M it seems...
Yeah, it's hard to talk about Swinburne without mentioning "flower-sweet fingers, good to bruise or bite" or "pain made perfect in thy lips/ for my sake when I hurt thee." Apparently he was into that sort of thing. What's interesting about it is that he talks about it so explicitly in the 1860's. Other poets like Tennyson and Rossetti often would eroticize their subjects, but I can't think of anyone being so outright about sexual gratification in the polite literary magazines of the time. And this was coffee table material for many people. You'd have your political journals out, maybe a fashionable novel, and then a poem about someone biting their partner to get off. Many critics think that this makes Swinburne pioneering and original. They see him as breaking down Victorian barriers to sex, and perhaps promoting a more modern attitude toward intercourse, fetishes, and lesbianism. In The Times, Jonathan Bate recently suggested that "It could quite reasonably be argued that Swinburne was not merely the prophet of the twentieth-century sexual revolution but the person who first gave open voice in the English language to the joys of lesbianism." The appraisal of Swinburne in its entirety is rather lukewarm (http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle6665787.ece), but there's a distinct appreciation for Swinburne's explicitness.
Yet I tend to think this view is based on a simple-minded understanding of the nineteenth-century. It presupposes that the there was only one conversation going on about sex--the restrictive, middle-class one that the twenty-first century is so antiquated with--but there were actually many different conversations going on about sex at the time. The way sexuality was approached in novels, for example, was quite different from the way it was rendered in the visual arts and poetry. Painting and verse appealed to a different audience and had different rules than those that applied to the novel. This means that where Thomas Hardy has to gloss over in Tess and Jude the Obscure, Swinburne could embellish. I don't think that what Swinburne was doing was really as transgressive as some people like to make it out to be. As I pointed out before, Tennyson and Rossetti's work had very erotic undertones. Rossetti even writes about orgasm. The difference between Swinburne and Rossetti is merely one of degree. They talk about similar things, but Swinburne goes a little farther. That makes him perhaps the most extreme, but it doesn't put him in a different category.
Anyway, you're right that he had a some kinky interests. What do you make of them? Do you think it helped or hurt his poetry?
"Par instants je suis le Pauvre Navire
[...] Par instants je meurs la mort du Pecheur
[...] O mais! par instants"
--"Birds in the Night" by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896). Join the discussion here: http://www.online-literature.com/for...5&goto=newpost
What's the deal with the sea? I know he does life-death-love-kinkiness but why is the sea mentioned a lot?
I find his interests amusing. At least he was an interesting writer.
I often think of Swinburne as in a league with Ernest Dowson, another not-much-talked-about Victorian poet. Perhaps Dowson was altogether more decadent and dandyish than Swinburne, but I don't know much about either... What do you think about Dowson?
I don't know if I know any Dowson...
'Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae' is perhaps one of the most beautiful Victorian poems ever written... There's also 'Vitae Summa Brevis' which is wonderful too.
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