• Algernon Charles Swinburne
• Justin A. Sider (bio)

In these pages, a little over a decade ago, Alan Young-Bryant joked aptly that Algernon Charles Swinburne was “the most neglected recovered poet of the period” (“Swinburne: ‘The Sweetest Name,’” VP 49, no. 3 [2011]: 301). He meant that our narrow vision of the poet stinted the sheer scope and variety of his writing. If steady work has somewhat remedied this situation, today the remark also seems apt in a different sense, as Swinburne occupies rather less of the field’s attention than he did a decade or so ago. Scholarship on Swinburne is slight this year, though the four publications range nicely over the poet’s verse forms, intellectual affiliations, critical reception, and relation to cultural history.

In Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth- Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), Elizabeth K. Helsinger explores the sociable forms of conversational poetry—poems committed to the political and ethical work of responding to others, to “that which is not the self” (p. 3). A chapter on Robert Browning and Swinburne proposes that these poet are [End Page 404] interested in “conditions of conversational asymmetry” (p. 56), where one party exercises power over another. For Swinburne, these are the conditions of tyranny, the domination of priests, kings, and gods. Helsinger’s chapter brings welcome attention to Swinburne’s verse dramas and to the genre more generally. In verse dramas like Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Erectheus (1876), she argues, “the web of speech and song binding characters and chorus constitutes the real dramatic action” (p. 58). The Greek choruses are crucial to the radical aesthetic of Swinburne’s verse dramas. They form a strikingly active “participating community” (p. 58) that at once draws in modern readers and widens the perspective of these plays beyond the purview of their doomed heroes and heroines.

In Atalanta, both the central characters and the chorus suffer the cruel whims of the gods, but in the exchanges between them, they also create “a singing-together in which the participants realize . . . the laws of song’s prosody as a way of keeping company with each other.” This lyric community models a resistance to tyranny by imagining, in prosody itself, an order that “binds gods and men alike” (p. 63). Erectheus develops this project through its incorporation of odic form, making the interplay of strophe, antistrophe, and epode into a kind of conversation. In doing so, the play brings into community heroic characters, choral populace, and the readers themselves. These songs represent a shared effort at voicing human freedom in “a world of hostile forces” and tyrannical power (p. 69). Yet Swinburne’s poems remain essentially tragic. As Helsinger acknowledges at the close of her discussion, “these mediated exchanges in song do not fundamentally alter Swinburne’s deeply pessimistic vision of human life in a God-dominated, tyrant-ridden world” (p. 69).

Catherine Maxwell’s essay “Swinburne, Pater, and the Cult of Strange Beauty” (19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 34 [2023]: https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.8884) teases out the intricacies of the personal and literary relationship between Swinburne and Walter Pater in order to consider their shared contribution to literary decadence. Maxwell’s run through the memoirs and letters of the two writers and their circle puts them together on various occasions—drunken hansom cab rides, poetry recitations in Pater’s rooms at Oxford in the late 1860s, and gatherings at Edmund Gosse’s house in the late 1870s. Though Swinburne downplayed any relationship with Pater later in life and Pater himself was quite reticent, their meetings, gifts, and circle of friends suggest a fair degree of personal and intellectual intimacy.

That intimacy finds its most telling form in their shared pursuit of “strange beauty.” As Maxwell notes, both the phrase and the idea owe something to Baudelaire’s “le beau est toujours bizarre” (“The beautiful is always strange”), but [End Page 405] also to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s insistence that poetry adds “beauty to that which is most deformed.” Maxwell tracks the influence of Swinburne’s poetry and his art writing, particularly his “Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence” (1868...

• 阿尔吉农·查尔斯·斯温伯恩
• 贾斯汀·A·西德 (简介)

十多年前，艾伦·杨·布莱恩特 (Alan Young-Bryant) 在这些页面中恰当地开玩笑说阿尔杰农·查尔斯·斯温本 (Algernon Charles Swinburne) 是“那个时期最被忽视的康复诗人”（“斯温本：‘最甜蜜的名字’”49，第3期[2011]：301）。他的意思是，我们对诗人的狭隘视野限制了他写作的纯粹范围和多样性。如果稳定的工作在一定程度上弥补了这种情况，那么今天这句话在不同的意义上似乎也很恰当，因为斯威本在该领域的关注度比十年前要少得多。今年关于斯威本的学术研究很少，尽管这四份出版物很好地涵盖了诗人的诗歌形式、知识背景、批评接受以及与文化史的关系。VP

In 诗歌对话：十九世纪英国诗歌对话（剑桥：剑桥大学出版社，2022 年），Elizabeth K. Helsinger探索会话诗歌的社交形式——致力于回应他人、回应“非自我”的政治和伦理工作的诗歌（第3页）。关于罗伯特·布朗宁和斯温伯恩的一章提出，这些诗人[End Page 404]对“对话不对称的条件”感兴趣（第 56 页），其中一方对另一方行使权力。对于斯温伯恩来说，这些都是暴政的状况，是牧师、国王和众神的统治。赫尔辛格的章节为斯威本的诗剧和更广泛的流派带来了受欢迎的关注。在诗剧中，例如《卡利登的阿塔兰忒》 (1865) 和 Erectheus (1876) ），她认为，“结合人物和合唱的言语和歌曲网络构成了真正的戏剧动作”（第 58 页）。希腊合唱对于斯温伯恩诗剧的激进美学至关重要。他们形成了一个极其活跃的“参与社区”（第 58 页），立即吸引了现代读者，并拓宽了这些戏剧的视角，超出了注定失败的男女主人公的范围。

在亚特兰大中，无论是中心人物还是合唱团都承受着众神的残酷反复无常，但在他们之间的交往中，他们也创造“一场让参与者意识到的共同歌唱”。 。 。歌曲的韵律法则是彼此陪伴的一种方式。”这个抒情团体通过在韵律本身中想象一种“将神与人结合在一起”的秩序来模拟对暴政的抵抗（第63页）。 Erectheus 通过融入颂歌形式来开发这个项目，使节节、反节节和节节的相互作用成为一种对话。通过这样做，该剧将英雄人物、合唱群众和读者本身带入了社区。这些歌曲代表了在“敌对势力的世界”和暴政中表达人类自由的共同努力（第 69 页）。然而斯温伯恩的诗歌本质上仍然是悲剧性的。正如赫尔辛格在讨论结束时承认的那样，“这些歌曲中的中介交流并没有从根本上改变斯温伯恩对上帝主宰、暴君横行的世界中人类生活的深刻悲观愿景”（第 69 页）。

凯瑟琳·麦克斯韦 (Catherine Maxwell) 的文章“斯温伯恩、佩特和对奇美的崇拜”(19：漫长的十九世纪的跨学科研究 34 [ 2023]：https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.8884）梳理了斯威本和沃尔特·佩特之间错综复杂的个人和文学关系，以考虑他们对文学颓废的共同贡献。麦克斯韦浏览了两位作家的回忆录和信件，以及他们的圈子，将他们在不同的场合放在一起——醉酒驾驶双轮马车、1860 年代末在牛津佩特房间里的诗歌朗诵，以及 1870 年代末在埃德蒙·戈斯家里的聚会。尽管斯温伯恩在晚年淡化了与佩特的任何关系，而佩特本人也相当沉默寡言，但他们的会面、礼物和朋友圈表明了相当程度的个人和智力上的亲密关系。

这种亲密关系在他们对“奇异之美”的共同追求中找到了最明显的表现形式。正如麦克斯韦指出的，这句话和这个想法都归功于波德莱尔的“le beau est toujours bizarre”（“美丽总是奇怪的”），但是[End Page 405] 也感谢珀西·比希·雪莱坚持认为诗歌“为最畸形的事物增添了美感”。麦克斯韦追踪了斯威本诗歌和艺术创作的影响，特别是他的《佛罗伦萨古代大师设计笔记》（1868 年...