Whole Music of Passion New Essays on Swinburne

This is the first book of critical essays on Swinburne's poetry ever to be published, and appears at a time when interest in the art and literature of the Aesthetic Movement is growing very rapidly.With a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches, the essays cover Swinburne's work as a poet from the 1850's through to the 1880's, and represent the work of most of the best young scholars in this field. Their shared concern is to challenge T.S. Elliot's subtle damnation of Swinburne whereby his writings were consigned to a peculiar realm of semantic nullity. The result is a fresh sense of Swinburne's engagement with ideas and issues - moral, political, sexual and aesthetic - and a new understanding of his historical specificity.Three 'new' Swinburne poems - never previously published - are printed here for the first time.Rooksby, Rikky is the author of 'Whole Music of Passion New Essays on Swinburne', published 1993 under ISBN 9780859679251 and ISBN 085967925X.