Tag: decadent movement

Algernon Charles Swinburne: “There Was a Graven Image of Desire”

Photographers Unknown, A Graven Image of Desire

There was a graven image of Desire
            Painted with red blood on a ground of gold
            Passing between the young men and the old,
And by him Pain, whose body shone like fire,
And Pleasure with gaunt hands that grasped their hire.
            Of his left wrist, with fingers clenched and cold,
            The insatiable Satiety kept hold,
Walking with feet unshod that pashed the mire.
The senses and the sorrows and the sins,
            And the strange loves that suck the breasts of Hate
Till lips and teeth bite in their sharp indenture,
Followed like beasts with flap of wings and fins.
            Death stood aloof behind a gaping grate,
Upon whose lock was written Peradventure.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Cameo, Poems and Ballads, 1866

Born in London in April of 1837, Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, novelist, playwright and critic. He was one of the most accomplished lyric poets of the Victorian era and was a renowned symbol of rebellion against the conservative values of his time. The explicit and often obsessive sexual themes in some of his work shocked many readers; however, his primary preoccupation, implicit in his poetry and explicit in his critical writings, was the nature and creation of poetic beauty.

The eldest of six children of a wealthy Northumbrian family, Algernon Charles Swinburne grew up at the family’s home, East Dene, in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wright and the London home at Whitehall Gardens in Westminster. Considered frail and nervous as a child, he had fearlessness and energy to the point of being reckless. From 1849 to 1853, Swinburne attended Eton College where he wrote poetry and won prizes in both French and Italian. He later attended Oxford’s Balliol College from 1856 to 1860 with a brief period of expulsion in 1859  for publicly supporting the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini, a revolutionary leader who was convinced that Napoleon was the chief obstacle to Italian independence. 

During his time at Oxford, Swinburne became a member of the painter Lady Pauline Trevelyan’s intellectual circle at her country house, Wellington Hall. He met the brothers William Michael and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter Simeon Solomon, designer William Morris and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle of artists and writers. Swinburne spent his summer holidays at Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, which was the house of his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet. After his grandfather’s death in September of 1860, Algernon Charles Swinburne stayed with Scottish artist and poet William Bell Scott in Newcastle. 

The following year, Algernon Charles Swinburne visited the French enclave of Menton on the Riviera and stayed at the Villa Laurenti to recover from excessive use of alcohol. In December of 1862, Swinburne traveled with William Scott and his guests to the coastal town of Tynemouth in northeast England and relocated to London where he began an active writing career. In 1866, Swinburne published his collection “Poems and Ballads” which brought him instant notoriety, especially the poems “Anactoria” and “Sapphos” written in homage of Sappho of Lesbos, the ancient Greek poet. Other poems in the volume include “The Leper”, “Hymn to Proserpine” and “The Triumph of Time”. 

Swinburne is considered a poet of the Decadent Movement; centered in Western Europe, the movement followed the ideology of excess, the superiority of human fantasy and aesthetic hedonism over logic and the natural world. Many of Swinburne’s early works dealt with subjects considered taboo in the Victorian era and led to him becoming a person not welcomed in high society. Although he continued to write love and nature poetry, Swinbourne’s work after the first volume of “Poems and Ballads” became increasingly devoted to the issues of republicanism and revolutionary causes.

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote in a variety of poetic forms, including Sapphic stanzas, an ancient Greek verse form of four unrhymed lines. He also devised a poetic variation, called the roundel, based on the medieval French Rondeau form. The roundel consists of nine lines each having the same number of syllables, plus a refrain after the third and last lines.The refrains are repeated to a certain stylized pattern: they must be identical to the beginning of the first line and must rhyme with the second line. Swinburne published a book of these particular poems entitled “A Century of Roundels” in 1883 dedicated to his poet friend Christina Rossetti, the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 

Through out the 1860s and 1870s, Swinburne drank excessively and often, until his forties, suffered random physical collapses for which he required care until his recovery. In 1879, his friend and literary agent, Theodore Watts-Duncan, intervened during a time when Swinburne was dangerously ill. Watts-Duncan isolated Swinburne at a suburban home in Putney where he gradually withdrew him from alcohol and association with many former friends and habits. Swinburne stayed thirty years with Watts-Duncan who is generally credited with saving Swinburne’s life and encouraging him to continue writing to his old age. During his time in Putney, nature and landscape poetry began to predominate, as well as poems about children. Among this period’s works were the 1889 “Poems and Ballads, Third Series” and the 1904 “A Channel Passage and Other Poems”.

In addition to his poetry, Algernon Charles Swinburne published volumes of literary criticism. His familiarity with a wide range of world literatures contributed to a critical style rich in quotation, allusion, and comparison. Swinburne is especially noted for his studies of Elizabethan dramatists and many poets and novelists of French and English origins. He also wrote witty and insightful essays, notably “Notes on Poems and Reviews” and “Under the Microscope”, that were responses to criticism of his own works. Swinburne wrote one serial novel published under a pseudonym, the 1901”Love’s Cross-Currents”. A second novel, “Lesbia Brandon”, was unfinished at his death and is theorized, inconclusively, to be a thinly disguised autobiography. 

Algernon Charles Swinburne died in London on the tenth of April in 1909 at the age of seventy-two. Even early critics, who took exception to his subject matter, commended his intricate and evocative imagery, alliteration, and bold, complex rhythms. 

Notes: A collection of Algernon Swinburne’s poetry can be found at “My Poetic Side” located at: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/algernon-charles-swinburne-poems

Algernon Charles Swinburne was very impressed with the writings of fellow poet Victor Hugo. He visited the fief of Guernsey and Sark in the Channel Islands to follow in the footsteps of his hero. An article on Swinburne’s visit to Guernsey and Sark which includes excerpts of his poems to Hugo can be found at the Priaulx Library site located at: https://www.priaulxlibrary.co.uk/articles/article/victor-hugo-and-guernsey-algernon-charles-swinburne-king-sark 

An extensive 2004 article on the life of Algernon Charles Swinburne by Rikky Rooksby for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography can be found at: https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36389;jsessionid=9236C8557201601EE0BDA8060AD6D1FB?aulast=Gosse&date=1912&genre=book&sid=oup:orr&title=The%20life%20of%20Swinburne&mediaType=Article 

Top Insert Image: Edward George Warris Hulton, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, circa 1850-1909, Gelatin Silver Print, Hulton Archive

Second Inset Image: William Bell Scott, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, 1860, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 x 33.2 cm, Balliol College, University of Oxford

Third Insert Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, 1860, Pencil on Paper, 33 x 35.6 cm, Mark Samuels Lasner Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, 1862, Watercolor on Paper, 17.8 x 15.2 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England

Shirley Everett Johnson: “The End and Aim of Art”

Photographers Unknown, Twelve Portraits of Men

Howard then blurted out this proposition: “I say, fellows, let us form a new club, to be known as “The Cult of the Purple Rose.” What do you say?”

Lucian Denholm, the tall, slender man with a pensive face, who was really brilliant and therefore said little, was now the first to speak, because the name had been suggested by his Purple Tea. He was enthusiastic in favor of the scheme, and said he was complimented by the recognition of his efforts to be original. Then he outlined his plan.

“Oh, it will be simple lovely,” he said, “and so original! We will all wear purple roses, and write on purple linen, —I might say purple and fine linen, —use three cent purple stamps instead of the customary twos, and if any of us should ever write on white paper, he must invariably use purple ink.

“Besides, we would attract so much attention with our purple handkerchiefs and hat bands. It will be so gratifying to hear people remark how hideous they are, and we can be as truly happy as the end and aim of art will allow.

“And to carry it further, we can write purple verses and purple stories and tell purple lies, in lieu of commonplace white lies. And just as it has been shown how lying is a fine art, so much more will purple lying be art.”

—-Shirley Everett Johnson, The Cult of the Purple Rose, Section II, 1902

There is very little information on the life of Shirley Everett Johnson, the author of “The Cult of the Purple Rose”. It is known that he graduated from Harvard University with the class of 1895, which he joined following his sophomore year at the Louisville High School. Johnson was not known to have participated in any of the recognized extracurricular activities available at the college. During his life, he was a journalist and a banker in the state of Kentucky. 

Johnson’s only published books are the 1901 “Conquering a Small Pox Epidemic in Kentucky” and the 1902 novel “The Cult of the Purple Rose: A Phase of Harvard Life”, which was published by Richard G. Badger of Boston’s Gorham Press. 

Considered to be among the genre known as proto-gay novels, “The Cult of the Purple Rose”  is an odd, esoteric example of American college fiction, one which dealt with Harvard University’s student life at the very end of the nineteenth-century. The book’s preface states that the story concerns the lives of a few exceptional people and should not be taken as a full presentation of Harvard undergraduate life. Although a fictional work, some  parts of the book are known to be factual. These include remarks made about publishers Herbert S. Stone and Ingalls Kimball, who as Harvard undergraduates were responsible for the 1894 “The Chap Book” and the 1893 “First Editions of American Authors”. 

In “The College Pump” article, published in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin of April 19, 1958, there was an extract from a doctoral thesis by Maurice F. Brown Jr. which explored the late nineteenth-century, cultural climate of the Yard, the historical campus area of Harvard containing most of the freshman dormitories. This excerpt contained a discussion of “The Cult of the Purple Rose” and also a discussion on the Laodicean Club of 1893. There is speculation that what was known as The Cult of the Purple Rose may have actually been the Laodicean Club.

Whether regarded as fictional or factual-based, “The Cult of the Purple Rose” presented a portrait of Harvard University’s reaction to publications associated with the Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the late-nineteenth century. Both of these movements ran contrary to the established persona of Harvard University. The artists and writers of  the Aesthetic movement tended to believe that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey sentimental or moral messages. The Decadent movement followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality, and held to the view that human creativity and art were superior to logic and the natural world. Literary examples of these movements include “The Lark” and the literary quarterly “The Yellow Book”, both published in England.

The story within “The Cult of the Purple Rose” also presented the university’s perception and judgement of such prominent figures of the time as essayist Max Beerbohm whose works first appeared in “The Yellow Book”, illustratorAubrey Beardsley who co-founded “The Yellow Book”, and author Oscar Wilde. All three, among others, were members of the Aesthetic movement.

Notes: 

In the Harvard Illustrated Magazine, Volume IV, October of 1902, there is a review of “The Cult of the Purple Rose”. Although the main aspects of the plot was considered to be nonsensical, the book was judged as clever and readable, at times witty, but by no means sincere. The type-work and cover were considered attractive and the book distinctly well made. 

A full edition of “The Cult of the Purple Rose” can be found at the Internet Archive located at: https://archive.org/details/cultpurplerosea00presgoog/mode/2up