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eBook details
- Title: Intimations and Imitations of Immortality: Swinburne's "by the North Sea" and "Poeta Loquitur" (Algernon Charles Swinburne) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 235 KB
Description
Remarkably little attention has been paid to a poem that Algernon Charles Swinburne himself preferred in "metrical and antiphonal effect" (1) to all of his previous poems. The first sustained study of "By the North Sea" (originally published in Studies in Song, 1880) is found in the introduction to a translation of Heinrich Heine's Die Nordsee in 1916. Howard Mumford Jones, despite using "By the North Sea" to demonstrate why Heine's is the superior North Sea poem, reads Swinburne's work sensitively and critically. Much of the early twentieth century criticism of the poem, however, echoes Matthew Arnold's observation that Swinburne has a "fatal habit of using one hundred words where one would suffice." (2) Even Swinburne's most favorable critics, his early biographers, struck blows at the poem that long hindered its critical acceptance. Harold Nicolson, in 1926, wrote it off as one of "three long sea pieces, competent but wholly uninspired." (3) In 1929, Samuel Chew claimed that Swinburne "relinquished gladly the unnecessary function of thought, and yielded himself to the rhythmic undulations and eddies of the verse that seems to take color and motion from its theme." (4) George Lafourcade, in 1932, said that the poem contains a "fatal discrepancy between matter and form." (5) Most famously exemplified by T. S. Eliot's 1920 essay "Swinburne as Poet," the charge of excessive verbosity and lack of meaning or import has been part of Swinburne studies from the beginning) It is particularly unfortunate, that such a masterful and central poem as "By the North Sea," one of Swinburne's most powerful lyrics, was so long obscured by this biting criticism. "By the North Sea" enjoyed a minor renaissance in the 1970s, initiated by a discussion in Jerome McGann's Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (1972). Although he devotes only a brief three pages to it, McGann engages the poem in the serious critical reading that previous scholars had avoided or ignored. Kerry McSweeney's 1973 article-length explication of the poem immediately followed. David Riede's excellent analysis of the poem as regards the Romantic heritage in 1978 is the only other detailed study of "By the North Sea." (7) Although most scholars no longer jumble the poem into the heap of bad "Putney poetry" or whimsical "nature poetry," none have studied it closely since the 1970s.
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