KAREN ALKALAY-GUTVictorian poetry to be responsive to his vulnerability, despite its artificiality.
Later in his poetry, Yeats rejects "embroideries" (2) altogether, claiming
that there is "more enterprise / In walking naked" ("A Coat" [1914], WBY
9-10). In many respects, this appeal to "naked[ness]" - where poetry no
longer has any need for ornate decoration - may well sound one of the
keynotes of literary Modernism: the avant-garde movement with which
Yeats's work is usually associated, and which often sought to strip poetry
bare of rhetorical superfluities. But if we agree that a "naked" aesthetic
announces the "enterprise" of Modernism, then we must understand that
such "enterprise" was deeply embedded in the "night and light and half-
light" of aestheticism and Decadence. Indeed, the word "naked" - for all its
Modernist "enterprise" - reminds us of those frustrated passions and
yearned-for sensations that absorbed two generations of Victorian poets,
from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Wilde, in "wine and woman and song."
NOTES
1 John Morley, "Mr Swinburne's New Poems," Saturday Review, 4 August 1866,
145-
2 Swinburne, Notes on Poems and Reviews (London: John Camden Hotten,
1866), reprinted in Swinburne, Swinburne Replies: Notes on Poems and
Reviews, Under the Microscope, Dedicatory Epistle, ed. Clyde Kenneth Hyder
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1966), 18.
3 Emerson's words are recorded in an interview that appeared in Frank Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper, 3 January 1874, and reprinted in Clyde K. Hyder,
"Emerson on Swinburne: A Sensational Interview," Modern Language Notes 48
(1933), 180.
4 Matthew Arnold "The Study of Poetry," in Arnold, English Literature and Irish
Politics, ed. R.H. Super, The Complete Prose Works Of Matthew Arnold, 11
vols. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960-77), IX, 161.
5 Arnold, "The Study of Poetry," 171.
6 Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay
Entitled 'Four Ages of Poetry,'" in Shelley, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed.
Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977),- Shelley's essay first appeared in Ollier's Literary Miscellany 1 (1820).
7 Arthur Symons, "The Decadent Movement in Literature," Harper's New
Monthly Magazine 87 (1893), 858.
8 Robin Sheets, "Pornography and Art: The Case of 'Jenny,'" Critical Inquiry 14
(1988), 323.
9 Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1972), 34 , 35. McGann's experimental
study offers a unique approach to understanding Victorian poetry; he orches-
trates his argument through dialogues spoken by six characters who are based
on noted late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century critics who wrote at length
about Swinburne.
10 Swinburne, Swinburne Replies, 23.
252