A more serious Swinburne link

[tree_and_leaf]

I've just found this essay on Swinburne by A E Housman, that most acerbically perceptive classical textual scholar (oh, and he wrote some poetry, too). It's long, but very perceptive, and it has some fascinating things to say about Swinburne's merits and demerits, including quite a lot about his prosody. It also manages to be remarkably snarky and yet finish on a fair, even affectionate note.

To take three of his most impressive and characteristic poems, the three which I have mentioned last, Dolores, and Ilicet, and The Triumph of Time: there is no reason why they should begin where they do or end where they do; there is no reason why the middle should be in the middle; there is hardly a reason why, having once begun, they should ever end at all; and it would be possible to rearrange the stanzas which compose them in different orders without lessening their coherency or impairing their effect.

Comments

[grondfic.livejournal.com]

You're into SWINBURNE too? *think I love you*

[tree_and_leaf]

I like bits of Swinburne very much; the trouble is that he didn't quite know when to stop (in a lterary sense, I mean). It's probably the curse of having such a good sense of rhyme and metre. I think Housman gets him pretty well.

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

I always thought that that essay was a bit odd in its structure; it spends a very great deal of time dismantling Swinburne and then the final paragraph abruptly turns around ... but the dismantling is a tour de force.

[tree_and_leaf]

I suspect it's because being nasty came so much more easily to Houseman than being nice! And compared to some of the things he says about his fellow classical scholars, it's practically fawning...

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

Judged by that yardstick, almost any sentence that does not say that one's friends will be calling the next day to arrange the time of the duel is a friendly sentence :)