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Taking Back the Ballad: Swinburne in the 1860s
Victorian Poetry ( IF 0.1 ) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 , DOI: 10.1353/vp.2016.0030
Elizabeth Helsinger

Despite its title, Algernon Charles Swinburne's inaugural 1866 collection, Poems and Ballads, contains very few ballads. Some poems entitled "ballad" arc in fact versions of continental lyric forms like the canzone ("A Ballad of Life") or the ballade ("A Ballad of Burdens"). Indeed, the 1866 Poems and Ballads includes an astonishing number of different lyric forms: not only ballads, ballades, and canzoni, but songs, rondeaux, a carol, a lamentation, a litany, a hymn, and poems in sapphics and hendecasyllabics (after Sappho and Catullus, respectively). In his first collection, Swinburne was exploring a broad range of the forms that lyric poetry might take. In demonstrating through creative imitation his mastery of so many different lyric forms, Swinburne was doing something very much like Tennyson in his first major collection of 1830, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Some of Swinburne's and Tennyson's best-known short, narrative, ballad-like poems in their respective early volumes, though they differ markedly in their engagements with earlier ballad materials, both direct readers to continental models, even though both poets were intimately familiar with the old ballads collected, edited, and published in Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). In the early 1860s, however, Swinburne edited a number of older ballad texts from Scotland and the north of England and composed some startlingly similar poems of his own. They included not only story-ballads but other songs arising from situations those stories suggested: a Northumbrian widow's lament, a condemned Jacobite's farewell, a song for a wake, and the last words or "neck-verse" for a border thief betrayed by his lover and about to be hanged. His verse caught with remarkable acuity the sound and the sense of older popular ballads from Northumbria and the border counties of Scotland that, if we believe Swinburne's semi-autobiographical novel (also dating from the early 1860s), he had first encountered as a boy visiting his grandfather Swinburne's Northumbrian estate, Capheaton. (1) Swinburne's balladry in these years, I argue, sets itself against the lyricizing and balladizing practices of both editors and popular poets in the ballad revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, insisting instead on returning poetry to the harsh landscapes of feeling and forceful rhythms he found in the old songs of England's North. In this, one might say, he was closer to creative poet-editors and emulators like James Macpherson, Thomas Chatterton, or John Clare. (2) Swinburne's imitations depended not only on what he may have heard, but also on his more recent study of ballad and song texts in the British Museum. The projected ballad edition on which he was working in 1861 was intended, he wrote, "to contain all the best northern poems." (3) For each edited ballad, Swinburne seems to have studied multiple different versions earlier published by ballad scholars from Bishop Thomas Percy (1765) to Scott and his successors in the nineteenth century, especially William Jamieson (1806), William Motherwell (1827), George R. Kinlock (1827), Peter Buchan (1828), and, most recently, the American scholar of early English literature Frances James Child, the second edition of whose initial collection of English and Scottish ballads, in eight small volumes, had just been published in London. (4) Unlike his larger and better-known later collection of 1882-1898, Child's initial publication was part of a series intended to cover the whole history of English poetry; by including ballads and songs he extended that history from literary to popular traditions. Like many but not all of his predecessors (and like Swinburne), in this first effort Child, who did not at first confine himself strictly to narrative ballads, focused on words, not music, and relied primarily on printed sources. (5) Swinburne used the 1861 London edition of Child, but he did not follow all of Child's scholarly practices, still less his aesthetic and political preferences. …

中文翻译:

夺回民谣:1860 年代的斯威本

尽管标题如此,但阿尔杰农·查尔斯·斯威本 (Algernon Charles Swinburne) 1866 年的首部诗集《诗与歌谣》只包含很少的民谣。一些题为“民谣”的诗实际上是大陆抒情形式的版本,如 canzone(“生命的民谣”)或民谣(“负担的民谣”)。事实上,1866 年的诗歌和民谣包括数量惊人的不同抒情诗形式:不仅是民谣、民谣和康佐尼,还有歌曲、回旋曲、颂歌、哀歌、一连串、赞美诗以及 sapphics 和 hendecasyllabics 中的诗歌(之后分别是萨福和卡图卢斯)。在他的第一个系列中,斯威本正在探索抒情诗可能采取的广泛形式。通过创造性的模仿展示他对许多不同抒情形式的掌握,斯威本在他 1830 年的第一部主要诗集《诗,主要抒情》中所做的事情非常像丁尼生。斯威本和丁尼生各自早期卷中的一些最著名的短篇、叙事性、类似民谣的诗歌,尽管他们在使用早期民谣材料方面存在显着差异,两者都是大陆模式的直接读者,尽管两位诗人都非常熟悉在沃尔特·斯科特 (Walter Scott) 的《苏格兰边境吟游诗人》(1802) 中收集、编辑和出版的旧民谣。然而,在 1860 年代初期,斯威本编辑了一些来自苏格兰和英格兰北部的较旧的民谣文本,并创作了一些他自己的惊人相似的诗歌。它们不仅包括故事民谣,还包括从这些故事所暗示的情况中产生的其他歌曲:诺森伯兰寡妇的哀歌,一个被判刑的雅各布派的告别,一首唤醒之歌,以及一个被情人背叛并即将被绞死的边境小偷的遗言或“颈诗”。他的诗句非常敏锐地捕捉到了来自诺桑比亚和苏格兰边境县的较老流行民谣的声音和感觉,如果我们相信斯威本的半自传体小说(也可追溯到 1860 年代初期),他第一次遇到他祖父斯威本 (Swinburne) 在诺森伯兰 (Capheaton) 的庄园。(1) 我认为,这些年来斯威本的民谣与编辑和流行诗人在十八、十九世纪民谣复兴中的抒情和抒情做法背道而驰,相反,他坚持将诗歌回归到他在英格兰北部的古老歌曲中发现的情感和有力节奏的严酷风景中。在这一点上,有人可能会说,他更接近于詹姆斯麦克弗森、托马斯查特顿或约翰克莱尔等富有创造力的诗人编辑和模仿者。(2) 斯威本的模仿不仅取决于他可能听到的东西,还取决于他最近在大英博物馆对民谣和歌曲文本的研究。他写道,他在 1861 年创作的预计民谣版本旨在“包含所有最好的北方诗歌”。(3) 对于每一首编辑过的民谣,斯威本似乎都研究了早先由托马斯·珀西主教 (1765) 到斯科特及其继任者在 19 世纪,尤其是威廉·贾米森 (1806)、威廉·马瑟韦尔 (1827) 等民谣学者早期发表的多个不同版本, 乔治 R. 金洛克 (1827)、彼得·布坎 (1828) 以及最近的美国早期英国文学学者弗朗西斯·詹姆斯·柴尔德 (Frances James Child) 的第二版英国和苏格兰民谣的最初合集,共八卷,刚刚出版于伦敦。(4) 与他后来更大更广为人知的 1882-1898 年收藏不同,Child 的最初出版物是旨在涵盖整个英国诗歌历史的系列的一部分;通过加入民谣和歌曲,他将这段历史从文学传统扩展到了流行传统。像他的许多但并非全部的前任(以及斯威本)一样,在这第一次努力中,柴尔德一开始并没有严格限制自己的叙事民谣,专注于文字,而不是音乐,主要依靠印刷资源。(5) 斯威本使用了 1861 年伦敦版的 Child,但他并没有遵循 Child 的全部内容 他的学术实践,更不用说他的审美和政治偏好了。…
更新日期:2016-01-01
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