Tennyson

Before concluding, it is worth noting two smaller contributions to the study of Swinburne this past year that join Helsinger’s essay, mentioned earlier, in connecting Swinburne with latenineteenthcentury art and music. In a comprehensive book on Wagner’s artistic legacy, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), Alex Ross devotes a section of one chapter to Wagner’s role in PreRaphaelite art and poetry with brief readings of Tennyson, Arnold, Morris, and Swinburne. Citing “Laus Veneris” and Tristram of Lyonesse, Ross catches the Wagnerian ele ments in Swinburne’s incantatory verse. Though Wagner seemed to some British artists an interloper on their own cultural property, Ross notes just how completely Wagner’s version of the Tristan legend had taken over by the time of Tristram. Ross also tells us of two German immigrants whose reviews and essays paved the way for Wagner’s British reception. One was Francis Hueffer, who married Catherine Madox Brown, the daughter of Ford Madox Brown, and whose son would become the poet and novelist Ford Madox Ford. The other was Edward Dannreuther, founder of the London Wagner Society, whose affiliation with Swinburne is also addressed this year by Michael Craske in “Dannreuther’s Hidden Swinburne References Signal Artistic Kinship” (Notes and Queries 66, no. 2 [2019]: 300–302). Dannreuther’s articles on Beethoven and Wagner in the early 1870s contain, as Craske shows, numerous small borrowings from Swinburne’s published criticism that create “a hidden statement of artistic fraternity” (p. 300). If work on Swinburne in 2020–2021 was somewhat scant, the scholarship nonetheless testifies to the curious centrality of this poet—to lateVictorian poetry and culture, to the prehistory of modernism, and to our field’s present concerns with identity, sexuality, and po liti cal vio lence. In these essays, Swinburne emerges as a crucial figure of Victorian modernism, gathering elements of nineteenthcentury artistic culture and innovating on them in ways that extend his reach well into the twentieth.