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- Title
Swinburne and Ireland.
- Authors
O’Gorman, Francis
- Abstract
This essay examines Swinburne’s political writings by considering his anti-Irish-nationalist rhetoric from the period of intense agrarian violence in Ireland in the 1870s through the ‘Home Rule’ crisis of 1886 and into Gladstone’s third administration. Although never considered before, Swinburne’s Irish poetry of the 1880s—generally Anti-Parnellite then anti-Gladstonian—urges readers, in the first place, to think harder about Swinburne’s Italian poetry of the 1870s and what really lay behind his apparent change from pro-nationalist ‘radicalism’ to anti-nationalist ‘reaction’. In fact, I propose, Mazzini’s conception of the providential identity of nations shaped both: Swinburne was being remarkably consistent. My essay then moves on to examine Swinburne’s response to violence in Ireland as a second way of revising traditional views of his politics. The Phoenix Park Murders in 1882 encouraged him to think of all Irish nationalism as steeped in blood during a period of acute agrarian violence whose commentators included Anthony Trollope. But in Marino Faliero (1885), written while Swinburne was still remembering Phoenix Park, the poet reflected on the dignity of violent nationalist heroism while acknowledging its moral ambivalence. What Swinburne could not admit either in his pro-violence writing on Italy or Russia, or in his anti-violence writing on Ireland, appeared furtively in the interpretative possibilities of his non-Byronic play of medieval Italy. In the difference between intention and reception there is, I think, a further complication in reading Swinburne’s politics more generally.
- Subjects
IRELAND; POLITICAL science writing; RHETORIC; VIOLENCE; IRISH poetry; ITALIAN poetry
- Publication
Review of English Studies, 2013, Vol 64, Issue 265, p454
- ISSN
0034-6551
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1093/res/hgs104