Major Poems and Selected Prose

Algernon Charles Swinburne (18371909) is, with Browning and Tennyson, one of the touchstone Victorian poets. He was a major critic and an important fiction writer as well. Emerging out of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, his bold and innovative work made him both a celebrated and controversial writer at home and a figure of international importance. Hugo, Baudelaire, and Mallarme were among his great admirers. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh now present a generous sampling of Swinburne's poetry and prose. This wide-ranging collection satisfies a long need for a comprehensive selection of Swinburne's work. It is accompanied by learned and critically incisive commentaries and notes.

Jerome McGann, the John Stewart Bryan Professor at the University of Virginia, is the author of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost and editor of Rossetti's Collected Poetry and Prose, both published by Yale University Press. Charles L. Sligh is a research fellow at The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive.

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction

xv

Chronology

xxix

Part One Poetry

Atalanta in Calydon (1865)

3

(65)

from Poems and Ballads (1866)

A Ballad of Life

68

(2)

Laus Veneris

70

(12)

The Triumph of Time

82

(10)

Itylus

92

(1)

Anactoria

93

(8)

Hymn to Proserpine

101

(3)

Hermaphroditus

104

(2)

Anima Anceps

106

(1)

A Match

107

(1)

Faustine

108

(4)

Stage Love

112

(1)

The Leper

113

(4)

Before the Mirror

117

(2)

Dolores

119

(11)

The Garden of Proserpine

130

(3)

Hendecasyllabics

133

(1)

Sapphics

134

(2)

Dedication 1865

136

(3)

from Songs Before Sunrise (1871)

Prelude

139

(5)

Hertha

144

(5)

Before a Crucifix

149

(5)

Genesis

154

(3)

from Songs of Two Nations (1875)

Locusta

157

(1)

from Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878)

A Forsaken Garden

158

(2)

Sestina

160

(1)

The Complaint of Lisa (Double Sestina)

161

(4)

Ave atque Vale

165

(5)

Sonnet (with a Copy of Mademoiselle de Maupin)

170

(1)

A Ballad of Dreamland

171

(1)

A Ballad of François Villon

171

(1)

A Vision of Spring in Winter

172

(3)

The Complaint of the Fair Armouress

175

(3)

from Songs of the Springtides (1880)

On the Cliffs

178

(11)

from Studies in Song (1880)

By the North Sea

189

(14)

from The Heptalogia (1880)

The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell

203

(1)

Sonnet for a Picture

204

(1)

Nephelidia

204

(2)

Tristram of Lyonesse (1882)

206

(107)

from A Century of Roundels (1883)

In Harbour

313

(1)

Plus Ultra

314

(1)

Plus Intra

314

(1)

On an Old Roundel

314

(1)

To Catullus

315

(1)

Envoi

315

(2)

from Poems and Ballads, Third Series (1889)

To a Seamew

317

(3)

Neap Tide

320

(2)

from Astrophel and Other Poems (1894)

A Nympholept

322

(8)

from A Channel Passage and Other Poems (1904)

The Lake of Gaube

330

(2)

Ina Rosary

332

(5)

Part Two Collected Prose

"The Monomaniac's Tragedy, and other Poems, by Ernest Wheldrake" (1858)

337

(6)

from "Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal" (1862)

"He has chosen to dwell mainly upon sad and strange things" (6 September 1862, Spectator)

343

(5)

Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866)

348

(12)

from "Byron" (1866, 1875)

"Splendid and imperishable excellence"

360

(1)

"The ebb and flow of actual life"

360

(1)

"These poems are coherent and complete as trees or flowers"

361

(2)

from "Matthew Arnold's New Poems" (1867, 1875)

"A French critic"

363

(4)

"Thyrsis" and "The Forsaken Merman"

367

(3)

from "Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence" (1868, 1875)

Michelangelo: "Fairer than heaven and more terrible than hell"

370

(2)

from "Notes on Some Pictures of 1868" (1868, 1875)

"D.G. Rossetti"

372

(3)

from William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868)

"He was born and baptized into the church of rebels"

375

(1)

"To him all symbolic things were literal, all literal things symbolic"

376

(3)

William Blake and Dante

379

(1)

"Art for art's sake first of all"

380

(2)

William Blake and Walt Whitman

382

(3)

from "Victor Hugo" (1869, 1872, 1875)

Crossing the Channel from Ostend

385

(1)

"The rule of art is not the nile of morals"

386

(2)

"Art knows nothing of time"

388

(2)

from "The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti" (1870, 1875)

"This 'House of Life' has in it so many mansions"

390

(2)

"The sacred art of Mr. Rossetti"

392

(3)

from A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877)

Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot: "The great gulf between pure genius and pure intellect"

395

(2)

Charlotte and Emily Brontë: "The tragic use of landscape"

397

(3)

"Emily Brontë" (1883, 1886)

400

(9)

Part Three Uncollected Poetry

Dies Irae

409

(1)

[The High Victorian Tone]

410

(1)

[Sonnet: Body Beautiful]

411

(1)

The Ballad of Villon and Fat Madge

411

(1)

A Ballad of Dead Creeds

412

(1)

The Cannibal Catechism

413

(2)

Cleopatra

415

(3)

from "Arthur's Flogging"

418

(4)

[Sonnet: Between Two Seas]

422

(1)

Poeta Loquitur

422

(2)

Disgust: A Dramatic Monologue

424

(5)

Part Four Uncollected Prose

A Criminal Case

429

(4)

Dead Love (Once a Week, 1862)

433

(4)

The Portrait

437

(3)

Les Abimes. Par Ernest Clouët

440

(5)

from Lucrezia Borgia; the Chronicle of Tebaldeo Tebaldei

"Chapter IV: Of the Gift of Amorous Mercy"

445

(2)

"Chapter VI: The Treatise of Noble Morals"

447

(5)

from Lesbia Brandon, "Via Dolorosa"

452

(15)

To E.C. Stedman, Feb. 1875 [a Memoir]

467

(8)

Explanatory Notes

475

(18)

Bibliography to the Introduction

493

(2)

Indexes

495

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Major Poems and Selected Prose

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials