Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and historicism

another classical model. Swinburne was the protege of the Oxford classicist
Benjamin Jowett. The young poet probably assisted Jowett in his popular
English translation of Plato. The author of Atalanta belonged to a new
generation of Oxford-educated Hellenists: scholars who were to carve out
for themselves alternative versions of Ancient Greece for modern times
from the humanistic Hellenism endorsed by Victorian liberal intellectuals
such as Arnold, Jowett, and Mill.
Swinburne himself developed a form of Hellenism that generally cele-
brated the paganism of ancient Greece. In his "Hymn to Proserpine"
(1866), the speaker - a fourth-century Roman follower of the ancient
pagan faith - foresees the passing of the old religion after the proclamation
of Christianity in Rome. By contrast with Arnold's lament for the retreat of
the Christian "sea of faith" in "Dover Beach," Swinburne's poem offers a
view of the tides of history in which regret for the ebb of pagan faith with
the establishment of Christianity is framed by an acceptance of Heraclitean
flux. (Heraclitus [C.535-C.475 BC] stated the idea that all things remain in a
state of flux, differentiated from fire - the first element, and single mobile
principle - only through incessant strife.)

All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast

Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,

Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:

Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,

And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,

White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,

Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

(ACS I, 69-70)

Against the "grey" religion of Christ (the "pale Galilean"), Swinburne
opposes a classicism whose colorful energy is dynamically realized in the
elevated rhetoric and rhythmical vigor of his metrical experimentation with
ancient prosodic models.
Swinburne's affinity with the Oxford don Walter Pater's relativist histori-
cism, and with his particular construction of ancient Greece, is readily
apparent. Pater's famous study titled "Winckelmann" first appeared in the
Westminster Review in 1867, and it caused as much of a stir as most of the
poems (including "Hymn to Proserpine") that appeared in Swinburne's
Poems and Ballads the previous year. In this essay, Pater represents the
eighteenth-century German art historian as a student of Plato, in a manner
that signals a radical modification of the cultural meanings of Hellenism.
He argues that the Greek philosopher to whom Winckelmann is drawn is
not the Plato of "[t]he modern student" - the one who "most often meets