Swinburne and His Gods

Swinburne and His Gods is the first serious critical analysis to examine the poet's background in the high church in the context of his work. Louis clearly shows Swinburne's fierce and intimate hostility toward the church and reveals his particular irritation with the doctrines of Newman, Keble, and Trench. In her explanation of his poetic use of sacramental imagery, especially those images connected with the Last Supper, Louis shows how Swinburne's eucharists can be murderous or erotic, aesthetic or republican. The demonic parody that characterizes Swinburne's work is shown to have developed through experimentation with neo-romantic alternatives to Christianity: first through the evocation of a quasi-sadistic pessimism, then in the embodiment of the "sun-god of Art," and, finally, as a feeble gesture toward an unknowable deity which moves elusively both within and beyond the natural world. Rather than imposing artificial unity on the poet's career, Louis presents his work as an integrated series of serious and brilliant experiments in Romantic art.

"This is unquestionably the best study of Swinburne to appear in many years. In its depth and breadth of scholarship and in its perspicuous and often brilliant reading of the poems, it will have a strong impact on our understanding of the poet ... I thought I knew Swinburne's work extremely well, but I learned something new on almost every page." David Riede, Department of English, Ohio State University. "makes an original contribution ... in analyzing Swinburne's debt to his High Church upbringing and to his reading in French Romanticism. I have never ... seen the relation between Swinburne and Victor Hugo so thoroughly and compellingly worked out...the author's discussion of sacramental imagery and Biblical allusions in Swinburne's poetry ... convincingly show[s] that Swinburne's poetic language is saturated with his religious thought." Glen Wickers, Department of English, Bishop's University.