To continue the trend of editorial snippets in authors' works, I ran across a fantastic introduction today as I was wandering through the library. I was looking for an edition of Swinburne's poetry to get a little taste of. Needless to say, I was drawn in by the equally potent prose of the introduction. Drawn into fits of laughter.
From Introduction, Selections from the Poetical Works of A.C. Swinburne from the Latest English Edition of His Works. Ed. R.H. Stoddard. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, 1884.
“The great gift of poetry – the greatest which Heaven has conferred upon mankind and the one which, if well balanced and wisely exercised, confers the greatest pleasure on mankind – is a dangerous gift to its possessor. It separates him from his fellows, whose pursuits are of material and not spiritual things; and it creates for him a life in which they have no share. A law unto itself, it is lawlessness to them.”
“The consciousness of great powers is a misfortune to all but the greatest minds, for these alone distinguish between their use and abuse.”
“Power for power’s sake is not poetry. Byron never learned the truth; but the young Keats – the manikin whom he wished somebody would flay alive – knew it instinctively. Hear him: - (cites some poetry).”
(Now I really want to cite someone in a paper by going, “Hear him: - .”
“As we define poetry, which is not to be defined, so we divide the poets into schools, which, strictly speaking, are not schools.”
“But the fervor, the force, the elemental energy of the old masters is not theirs. They are fettered by poetic traditions.”
“If he believes in the old order of things, it is a destructive force, and he condemns it: if he believes in a new order of things, it is a reconstructive force, and he applauds it. But whatever he believes, he recognizes the force. “
“The glory of Scott was the last red tints of a setting sun, and the glory of Wordsworth the first mild radiance of a rising moon, when Byron came like a comet and paled their ineffectual fires. It was neither moonrise nor sunset when Swinburne came, but the full splendor of noontide, - the noontide of which the genius of Tennyson was the golden light, and the genius of Browning the concourse of circumambient clouds. Between the fleeting shadow of these clouds and the girdling spaces of sunshine he stepped forth, - a slight figure in the garments of the Greek priesthood, - youthful but for the grave, far-off look in his eyes, and passionate but for the cold severity of his mien. Young priest of an old religion, he rekindled the fire upon its antique altar, and restored the worship of its imperious gods.”
“[Blank verse] is an instrument upon which he was the first to play, and whose volume of sound no hand save his could evoke and control. One needs to be a poet in order to comprehend the difficulties it overcomes, and the triumphs it achieves, - the art, in short, of which it is so magnificent an example. But one need not be a poet in order to feel its solemnity, its grandeur, its greatness, and the weight of the stern, dark thought with which it is charged.”
“The combinations of sound which run so strangely through Swinburne’s poetry, and which cannot but end, one would thing, in the harshest discords, become, in his hands, rivers of sonorous music, which rush and roar along their several ways until they reach the sea, and are swallowed up in its long, tumultuous, endless harmony.”
“One of his defects, perhaps his prime defect, is the brilliancy and force of his vocabulary. No poet ever excelled him in the profusion with which he throws off rich and picturesque and spirited words: he is a perfect master of epithets. His pages are luminous mists of language, the exact meaning of which, and their bearing upon the matter in hand, it is generally difficult to discover, they are so bravely put forth, and with such sonorous pomps of sound.”
(Sorry, Swinburne, you’re just too brilliant.)
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