Poems and Ballads

"Swinburne is a really interesting figure. A Balliol student, but he didn’t finish his degree. Yes! I think Swinburne decided at one point that if the degree wasn’t going to be brilliant, he just wouldn’t finish. He’s really closely connected with the pre-Raphaelites; for example, he lived with D. G. Rossetti after Elizabeth Siddal died. Edward Burne-Jones’s painting “ Laus Veneris (In Praise of Venus) ” is based on Swinburne’s poem of the same name. Most of Swinburne’s poems were translations or versions of other poems. He’s very interested in English Sapphic – in trying to represent, in English verse, the form of Sappho’s poetry . You can see that in something like Anactoria . But the book I chose, the 1866 Poems and Ballads , is interesting as a collection for several reasons. First, it’s 1866. It’s early in the century for this kind of explicitness. Second, it clearly demonstrates the effect of Baudelaire on English poetry. You can see the blend of contagion and desire that is so central to Baudelaire in someone like Swinburne very early in the nineteenth century. It prefigures decadence—or, I would say, Swinburne shows that decadence is already there. It’s not just a fin de siècle thing. “Swinburne decided at one point that if the degree wasn’t going to be brilliant, he just wouldn’t finish” The other thing that’s amazing about Swinburne is that he’s interested in corruption, the erotic and how they mix together. But he’s also invested in the relationship between violence and sex. Some of the things I like to teach from Swinburne are his short pornographic poems, The Whippingham Papers . These are about birchings in public schools. They experiment with Victorian cross-generational romance, with homosexuality, and with sexual violence as part of sexual life. Flagellation is really interesting to him. Swinburne moves between a kind of register that requires a lot of erudition, such as versions of classical poems, and what I think we’d now read as a very low form in some ways, the pornographic poem. He’s also an interesting figure to think about because he had a long career and life; he wrote very widely, and is also known as a great critical essayist. He was scandalous, as you can imagine. The flagellation poems would not be widely disseminated. They were mostly privately circulated, which is why collectors are so interested in them. But take Anactoria . There’s a long description of trampling—the idea is that love produces a sort of violence that is soul-destroying and physically destroying. If you think about the colours that are represented in Swinburne’s poems, they’re almost always black, red and white. It’s about the intensification of bodily violence in love. Yes, and trying very hard to shock the senses, like you say. And remember, he’s doing this in the mid-nineteenth century. For readers who are huge fans of late nineteenth-century decadence, you could easily put any text by Oscar Wilde on this list, but I think it’s interesting to look at something earlier, which is, not in a comic mode but in a kind of violent mode, doing the same things you see representationally in Salomé . We see this in criticism, too. The energy of proto-modernist or avant-garde scholarship is concentrated in the late century, but if you look at earlier texts, there is evidence that a Baudelarian mingling of death and sex was being represented in English letters earlier than you might think."