Algernon Swinburne, Anthropologist

摘要

On 26 October 1869, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote to his friend the art critic William Michael Rossetti, telling him: "I have begun (for my 'Songs of the Republic') another mystic atheistic democratic anthropologic poem called 'Hertha'" (Letters 2: 45). Swinburne's note to Rossetti might seem little more than a throwaway remark, a characteristically exuberant list of his current enthusiasms, bearing at best a circumstantial relation to one another. Yet, the first three terms on his list are clearly apt to his second collection of poems, eventually published in January 1871 as Songs Before Sunrise. This collection is openly democratic in its politics, blasphemously anti-Christian, and quasi-mystical in its rhetoric, which has been aptly described by David Riede as "bardic or prophetic, as though presenting an established truth rather than perceiving and creating truth" (181-82). Given this correlation between Swinburne's stated intentions and the book itself, it is worth asking how the fourth of his terms might apply to this same collection. In what sense can "Hertha" and other poems from Songs Before Sunrise be described as "anthropologic". What models of anthropology might Swinburne have had in mind. Do his poems work with the data of anthropology, or do they in some sense undertake the work of anthropology themselves. How does Swinburne's anthropology bear on his mysticism, his atheism, his democratic politics. And what might his poems reveal about how poetry can claim to contribute to a scientific discipline, whether in practice or in principle