1.6 Algernon Charles Swinburne

Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837-1909), English poet noted for libertarian themes and stylistic virtuosity.

English poet and critic, outstanding for prosodic innovations and noteworthy as the symbol of mid-Victorian poetic revolt. The characteristic qualities of his verse are insistent alliteration, unflagging rhythmic energy, sheer melodiousness, great variation of pace and stress, effortless expansion of a given theme, and evocative if rather imprecise use of imagery. His poetic style is highly individual and his command of word-colour and word-music striking. Swinburne's technical gifts and capacity for prosodic invention were extraordinary, but too often his poems' remorseless rhythms have a narcotic effect, and he has been accused of paying more attention to the melody of words than to their meaning.

Swinburne was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford. In 1860 he published the two verse dramas The Queen Mother and Rosamond. Settling in London, he began a long association with the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and also formed friendships with the writers William Morris and George Meredith. Swinburne's choral verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865) gained him immediate fame. This poem was an ambitious attempt to reproduce the form and spirit of Greek tragedy, and it demonstrated the poet's extraordinary gift for sustained verbal melody.

Poems and Ballads (1866) created one of the most famous literary scandals of the Victorian period. Swinburne attempted to celebrate physical love and the life of the senses in the spirit of the ancient Greek lyric poets and certain French contemporaries. Some of the poems demonstrate his tendency to shock.

The political poems contained in Songs Before Sunrise (1871) were inspired in part by Swinburne's admiration for the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. Swinburne wrote many elegies, including one for Robert Browning.

By 1879 Swinburne's pleasure-seeking lifestyle had caused his health to decline seriously, and he moved into the Putney home of his friend the critic and poet Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton. Swinburne recovered and lived the rest of his life under Watts-Dunton's care. In the latter part of his career, criticism as well as verse occupied his energies. He wrote detailed and imaginative studies of Elizabethan drama in the Study of Shakespeare (1880) and The Age of Shakespeare (1909). His other notable works include the series of tragic verse dramas Chastelard (1865), Bothwell (1874), and Mary Stuart (1881).

Swinburne's reputation as a great poet rests upon a number of poems, such as Atalanta in Calydon,"Dolores" (1866), "Laus Veneris" (1866), and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). A writer of brilliant technical resources, he controlled the music of verse with total authority, and his experiments in the use of meter and rhyme produced a wide range of original poetic effects.

Lecture 7

Aestheticism. Neoromanticism. Realism.

Questions:

1. Decadent literature.

2. Oscar Wild and his Programme.

3. Neoromanticism

3.1 Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

3.2 Joseph Conrad

3.3 (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling

4. Realism

4.1 Herbert George Wells

4.2 John Galsworthy

1. Decadent literature.

The year of 1870 was the end of Victorian prosperity in England and the beginning of the new landmark in the progress of capitalism characterized by the growing class antagonism.

English literature of the period was represented, as we have already discussed in our last talk, by two main lines – realism and non-realism. While the literature of realism was aimed at creating a truthful picture of life (Thomas Hardy), non-realistic literature tried to escape from the realities of life either to the pre-capitalistic time (neoromanticists Stevenson, Conrad), or to the world of beauty (aesthetism O.Wilde).

A great role in the change of the aesthetic paradigm on the verge of the centuries was played by Pre-Raphaelites, a group of 19th-century English painters, poets, and critics who reacted against Victorian materialism and the neoclassical conventions of academic art by producing earnest, quasi-religious works. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in 1848, and its central figure was the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Pre-Raphaelite art became distinctive for its mixture of archaic, romantic, and moralistic qualities, but much of it has been criticized as superficial and sentimental, if not artificial. Millais eventually left the group, but other English artists joined it, including the painter and designer Edward Coley Burne-Jones and the poet and artist William Morris who urged a return to medieval traditions of design, craftsmanship, and community. In his political writings, he attempted to correct the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution by proposing a form of society in which people could enjoy craftsmanship and simplicity of expression.

The eminent English art critic John Ruskin was a passionate supporter of the movement. Rebelling against the aesthetically numbing and socially debasing effects of the Industrial Revolution, he put forth the theory that art, which is essentially spiritual, reached its zenith in the Gothic art of the late Middle Ages, which was inspired by religious and moral zeal (усердие).

New literary trends such as Decadence, Neoromanticism and Socialist literature (Realism) reflected the political and economic situation in Britain. The general crisis of the bourgeois ideology and culture was reflected in literature and fine arts by the trend that got the name of Decadence. The French word means ”decline” of art or of literature. Decadence manifested itself in various trends that came into being at the end of the 19^th cent.: symbolism, impressionism, imagism, futurism and others.

The most widely known manifestation of Decadence in the social life in England was Aestheticism (a movement in search of beauty). The roots of aestheticism could be traced back to the beginning of the 19^th cent., to some of the romanticists. The British decadent writers were deeply influenced by the Oxford don Walter Pater who stated that life had to be lived intensely, following an ideal of beauty. Decadent writers used the slogan "Art for Art's Sake" that is to say pure art and asserted that there was no connection between art and morality.

The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. They believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it need only be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor in art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the movement were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, and synaesthetic effects—that is, correspondence between words, colours and music.

Aestheticism had its forerunners in John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and among the Pre-Raphaelites.

Aestheticists rejected both the social and the moral function of art. Aestheticists tried to lead the reader away from the problems of the day into the world of dreams and beauty. The most famous representative of Decadence was Oscar Wilde.