Product Description

The last of the Romantics, Swinburne's poems took the public by storm, intoxicated by their rhythms and shocked by his lack of restraint.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60314 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Customer Reviews

Swinburne, Catherine Maxwell (Writers and their Work)
Catherine Maxwell's 'Swinburne' will go a long way to re-igniting interest in the poet; it is enticing and readily accessible to the reader who comes new to Swinburne , (she includes a lucid biographical outline and a very useful bibliography), but equally, it offers the Swinburne scholar an in-depth discussion of the more difficult areas, such as Swinburne's treatment of synaesthesia and his interpretation of the Victorian literary concept of sympathy. She offers fascinating and complex analyses of three poems from the time of 'Poems and Ballads: Series 1, 'Before the Mirror' written as a tribute to Whistler's painting, 'The Little White Girl,' 'Sapphics' and the unpublished 'Passiphae' (for which she usefully supplies the hard to come by text), and she shows what a shocking and radical role Swinburne gives the poet, linking poetic genius and female aberrance. She also devotes a useful chapter to the neglected area of Swinburne's prose writing, and points out its influence on Pater and Aestheticism.All in all, Maxwell reinstates Swinburne as a major literary figure in the nineteenth century, and she makes one eager to find out more about Swinburne and his milieu. 'Swinurne' is a worthy successor to Maxwell's previous ground breaking book on the effeminisation of the male lyric poet 'THe Female Sublime from Milton to SWinburne: Bearing Blindness.