« The Enduring End »
Algernon Swinburne’s poetical work is autopoietic — the poet elaborates his art as a self-contained, circular system that feeds itself and articulates around itself. Amongst the recurring aesthetic themes that he explores, the transition between the state of life and the state of death is at the cen...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte"
2018-07-01
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| Series: | Sillages Critiques |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/6462 |
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| Summary: | Algernon Swinburne’s poetical work is autopoietic — the poet elaborates his art as a self-contained, circular system that feeds itself and articulates around itself. Amongst the recurring aesthetic themes that he explores, the transition between the state of life and the state of death is at the centre of many of his poems, which he composes using innovative forms — the most characteristic one being very long rhapsodic poems and roundels (a particular variation on the rondeau of his own invention). Circularity, cyclicity, decomposition and recomposition, the motifs of the end and a potential, subsequent new beginning are ubiquitous in his work. Algernon Swinburne deconstructs the reader’s expectations and construes the textual end as a present absence that haunts the text. In the words of the poet, the end, relentlessly evoked, invoked and postponed, becomes a liminal zone of tension where a circular transsubstantiation of the text becomes possible. |
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| ISSN: | 1272-3819 1969-6302 |