‘Stars Caught in My Branches’

Chapter 17 considers Shelley as a predecessor who, paradoxically, taught Swinburne how to go beyond being ‘A sort of pseudo-Shelley’ (Matthew Arnold). Swinburne becomes his own kind of iconoclastic poet by starting from Shelleyan examples. The chapter reveals the intricacy with which Swinburne adapts and inherits Shelley’s poetic thought. It explores Swinburne’s response to Shelley through readings of paired poems across a range of literary kinds: lyric, remodellings of classical drama, elegy, and extended metapoetic rhapsodies-cum-meditations. As Shelley does, Swinburne explores myth while revealing the eternal energies of desire and dread that draws the poet towards it. Reading ‘To a Seamew’ (for example) as a saddened and lyrical reworking of Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’, this chapter attunes itself to Swinburne’s adaptations and insistent individuating of Shelley’s Romantic music. Again it contends, in relation to the view that Shelley’s work bravely seeks to face up and face down the forces pitted against affirmation, that Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon shows extreme sensitivity to this Shelleyan dialectic. Overall the chapter argues that Swinburne’s counter-Shelleyan achievement is to fuse a poem’s becomings with its essential being.