Scents and Sensibility

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Algernon Charles Swinburne ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
Romantic Poetry

A major reconceptualization of the imagination that reinstates its hidden links with the historically neglected sense of smell, this book is the first to examine the role played by scent and perfume in Victorian literary culture. Perfume-associated notions of imaginative influence and identity are central to this study, which explores the unfamiliar scented world of Victorian literature, concentrating on texts associated with aestheticism and decadence, but also noting important anticipations in Romantic poetry and prose, and earlier Victorian poetry and fiction. Throughout, literary analysis is informed by extensive reference to the historical and cultural context of Victorian perfume. A key theme is the emergence of the olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark André Raffalovich, Theodore Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different ways, signifying such diverse things such as style, atmosphere, influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement, individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.

Swinburne on “The Music of Poetry”

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (4-Part-1) ◽  
pp. 680-688
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Connolly
Keyword(s):  
Algernon Charles Swinburne ◽  
Critical Prose

More than any other critic of his day, Algernon Charles Swinburne judged poetry by its music, but, because Swinburne is so often ignored as a critic, much of what he had to say on this most elusive subject remains buried in his involved critical prose. Yet, what Swinburne had to say about the music of poetry is often instructive, for one so renowned for musical effects in his own poetry demands our attention when he discusses this subject.

The Worst Man in London

2018 ◽  
pp. 103-111
Author(s):  
Andrew Glazzard
Keyword(s):  
Death Certificate ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Algernon Charles Swinburne ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Public House ◽  
James Mcneill Whistler ◽  
Real Person

Charles Augustus Milverton, blackmailer of society women in the 1904 story that bears his name, is assumed by critics to be based on a real person – but which real person is open to doubt. The favourite is Charles Augustus Howell, a larger-than-life associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (whose members knew him as ‘Owl’), friend to James McNeill Whistler and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and one-time secretary to John Ruskin. However, it is by no means established that Howell was, in Lancelyn Green’s words, a ‘scoundrel and blackmailer’. He certainly seems to have fallen out with a lot of people, but the more outlandish stories about his life and death – Oscar Wilde may be the source for the claim that Howell was found dying outside a Chelsea public house ‘with his throat cut and a ten shilling piece between his clenched teeth’ – may be urban myths rather than actual facts: his death certificate, for instance, records that he died of pneumonia.

A Song, the Sea, and a Listening Boy: Whitman, Swinburne, Delius

2021 ◽  
pp. 240-253
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Helsinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Algernon Charles Swinburne ◽  
Moving Body

Song travels. Walt Whitman's poem ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ (1859) travels across the Atlantic to generate first another poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne (‘On the Cliffs’, 1879) and then a cantata by Frederick Delius (Sea Drift, 1903–04). The three works share less a particular sequence of sounds or words than a scene which is also an aural landscape with three distinct parts: song, or its figure, the singing bird; a rhythmically moving body of water that shapes and carries sound; and a listening boy, moved to translate what he hears into poetic or musical form. Using as historical frame two examples pertinent to nineteenth-century debates about the relations between words and music, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1770 mélodrame, Pygmalion, and Richard Wagner's 1860 essay, ‘Lettre sur la Musique’, this essay maps a Whitman-Swinburne-Delius journey of musical translation. Repetitions of Whitman's scene pose the question of song's travels from birdsong to poetry to musical composition. What travels includes the force behind the original song (its emotional springs) as well as the formal strategies by which different listeners translate what they hear into a poem or a piece of music. The rhythmic presence of the sea, as much a figure for such strategies as the singing bird is for inarticulate song, becomes as significant as that song and the listener it moves.

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