THAIS E. MORGANA controversy in which Arnold played poet and critic by turns ensued.
"'Empedocles on Etna' is an utter mistake," declared one reviewer. 15 Like
the rest of the 1852 poems, "Empedocles on Etna" shows Arnold "indul-
ging] to excess" in meditations that lead nowhere; it lacks "the severe
manliness" of true poetry which requires "action in all its forms" (69-70).
Taking his cue from such criticism, Arnold dropped "Empedocles on Etna"
from Poems (1853) and undertook a remasculinization of his poetics. The
famous "Preface" to his 1853 volume is a polemical essay that redefines the
gender of the genre of poetry. Treating "Empedocles on Etna" as a failed
poem, Arnold explains that he "intended to delineate the feelings" of its
hero as he experiences the decadence of Greek philosophy in parallel to the
"modern" situation which conduces to "the dialogue of the mind with
itself." 16 Appealing to Aristotle's theory of mimesis, according to which
action is more important than character, Arnold repudiates the effeminate
emphasis on feelings found in Romantic texts and in his own poetry up
through 1852. 17 "[S]uffering [which] finds no vent in action" (2) - such as
Empedocles's - is "morbid" (3), Arnold concedes. What the mid-Victorian
(male) reader wants is "incident" and a hero engaged in "resistance" to the
forces of nature and society who by his efforts suggests "hope" (3). Action
belongs to the public sphere of the masculine; feeling is effeminate in a man
because it pertains to the private sphere of the feminine. Yet Arnold's play,
Merope (1857), written to show how the model of classical tragedy could
reinvigorate verse, met with a cool reception from Victorian critics. In
contrast, Swinburne's first notoriety came from his oppositional version of
classical tragedy, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), which radicalizes the fatality
of desire and undercuts the Victorian ideal of manhood.
Swinburne reworks the mythology surrounding the classical god Apollo
in oppositional directions that push at the boundaries of sexual difference
while preserving his contrarious ideal of the virility of literature. Whereas
in the first series of Poems and Ballads he exposes the links between
Christian morality and sensual perversions, in Songs Before Sunrise (1871)
Swinburne widens his critique by grafting a sado-erotic rhetoric on the
discourse of the Christian tradition to deconstruct its main institutions:
monarchy and the church. "Before a Crucifix," for example, exposes the
abjection of both the "dead God" (ACS II, 86) and his worshippers: the
"piteous" (II, 81) spectacle of Christ's "sacred body [which] hangs and
bleeds" (II, 83) leads not to "freedom" and "less oppressions done" but to
the people's continual suffering which mimes that of their masochistic icon
Himself (II, 82). Christ-on-the-Cross is a disgusting fetish, "So when our
souls look back to thee / They sicken, seeing against thy side, /... The
leprous likeness of a bride, / Whose kissing lips through his lips grown /
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