Catherine Maxwell, Swinburne (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2006) Pages: 144; Hardback ISBN: 0746311060 Price: £31.99; Paperback ISBN: 0746309694 Price: £10.99

The value of this welcome addition to scholarship on Swinburne lies in its accessibility and, therefore, its potential to establish a more secure position for Swinburne in undergraduate programmes. Beginning with a survey of Swinburne’s critical fortunes, the book positions itself as a firm defender of Swinburne’s art and artistic project, understood as one with designs on its readers, best summarised in Maxwell’s contention that ‘Swinburne’s readers are meant to experience themselves as physical as well as intellectual beings as the verse communicates simultaneously to the mind and senses, predominantly through that psychologically charged bodily element: the nerves’. Maxwell works through Swinburne’s most famous works, largely concentrating on his poetic output but dedicating a final chapter to his ‘aesthetic prose’, providing a series of representative close-readings that deftly trace a path through complexity to illumination, demonstrating its importance for readers new to Swinburne. Of particular interest is the inclusion of ‘Pasiphae’ in an appendix, allowing general readers access to a poem – unpublished during Swinburne’s lifetime – that takes risks with erotic expression beyond even those in Poems and Ballads, but which ‘negotiates its subject matter with a self-delighting deftness’.

In wishing to bring the notoriously provocative content of Swinburne’s poetry into cohesive harmony with its artistic experimentation, Maxwell introduces her notion of Swinburnean sympathy, in which the poetry’s rhythm and rhyme cast a kind of aesthetic spell on its readers, drawing them in, sometimes disarmingly, to sympathy with the ‘emotional atmosphere’ of the verse. Here Maxwell emphasises other merging processes, such as synaesthesia, or pathetic fallacy, in order to provide a context – perhaps, one senses, legitimisation – that can itself provide sympathetic explanation of Swinburne’s fascination with the crossing over between pleasure and pain, or artistry and explicit sexuality. This ‘sympathetic’ paradigm infuses this volume, suggesting it as a principle of composition for Swinburne but also as a principle of understanding for his readers. Where the moral, or indeed aesthetic, implications of being besieged by poetry lead, however, is unclear. Suggestive readings of Swinburne’s feminising gestures, in a useful section of chapter two that delineates the importance of Italy for nineteenth-century female writers, while energetically emphasising the merging notion of the male Swinburne with his female protagonists, can lead to what feels like a strained assertion of the heterosexual nature of Swinburnean passion. Here Maxwell takes issue with Thais Morgan’s emphasis on Swinburne’s androgyny and sexual ambiguity.

Maxwell’s impressive close readings, nevertheless, do draw the reader in to renewed appreciation of the exhilarating beauty of Swinburne’s writing and her emphasis on trope and imagery helpfully rationalises Swinburne’s excesses into a rewarding reading experience. The volume itself appeals to the senses in its recurring returns to images of mythic beauty, femininity, female faces, falling hair, blooming flowers, and merging bodies across discussion of Poems and Ballads 1 & 2, Songs before Sunrise, some prose works, and a useful coda on Tristram of Lyonesse, which introduces the myth more broadly as well as Swinburne’s specific treatment of its passion and tragedy. The status of these returning images, however, is troubling: whether their recurrence is testament to Swinburnean exploration and development, or of fixation and fetish, is something that, perhaps, readers that this book inspires will come to address and answer. This volume would provide an excellent undergraduate guide to a sometimes intimidating writer; those thus introduced might find themselves dwelling on the significance of the image of ‘lovers at peace and united’ with which this volume ends.

Rhian Williams (University of Birmingham)

For more details, see the Northcote House website.