35 - Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne

Summary

When Arthur Henry Hallam introduced the poetry of his friend Tennyson to the Victorian reading public in 1831, he introduced him as a poet of ‘sensation’ in the school of Keats and Shelley as opposed to ‘reflection’ in the school of Wordsworth. In introducing Tennyson as a poet who does not suffer his mind ‘to be occupied during its creation by any other predominant motive than the desire of beauty’, Hallam was perhaps premature in heralding the advent of a genuinely aesthetic school of British poetry, but he seems almost prophetically to have introduced the later generation of great Victorian poets of what Walter Pater called the ‘“aesthetic” poetry’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne and William Morris. Pater introduced the term ‘aesthetic poetry’ in his review of Morris’s The Earthly Paradise in 1868, but he dated the origin of such poetry to Morris’s earlier volume, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), and he defined it as a poetry ‘tormented and awry with passion, like the body of Guenevere defending herself from the charge of adultery’, poetry characterised by ‘the strange suggestion of a deliberate choice between Christ and a rival lover’. Pater was primarily interested in the way in which these poets, like the poets of the late Middle Ages, expressed the ‘composite experiences of all the ages’ as transmitted in art and incorporated in the body and mind of the poet. His use of the term ‘aesthetic’ was undoubtedly intended to suggest the intellectual apprehension of past artistic achievements, but it also very explicitly and aptly returns to the root meaning of ‘aesthetic’ in sensation and the body.