Swinburne: Criticism as Perversion

Abstract

Although influential and provocative in his own time, Swinburne has not been accorded critical acclaim. One reason is the daunting scope of his work; another is the resistance his work shows to easy classification. One way to appreciate his achievement as a critic is to approach it through the concept of “perversity,” a term that in Freudian psychology implies deviation from a sexual norm. Because the term implies a form of pleasure that it heterogeneous, dispersed, and non-(re)productive, it is an apt way to approach Swinburne’s literary output. Swinburne’s perversity led him to blur genre lines, writing poetically in essays and using poems as a form of literary critique. These points are illustrated in an extended analysis of his poem “Anactoria” and the commentary he composed as a defense, published in his Notes on Poems and Reviews: the perverse physical and emotional landscape of the poem is defended in the Notes on the grounds that it is eminently normal. The “perverse aesthetic” of Swinburne’s criticism foregrounds the nonutilitarian qualities of art that he promoted most famously in his pronouncement of the doctrine of “art for art’s sake.”