Цитаты из книг — Энтони Харрисон

Throughout Balen, Swinburne uses these images to suggest a return to nature that Victorians such as not in print version Ruskin and not in print version Morris continually associated with medieval times. (For instance, the pun on the word nature in Ruskin's famous chapter "The Nature of Gothic" has to my knowledge not yet…

As Swinburne matured, his important poetry became less erotic and sadomasochistic, less iconoclastic, and concerned less with the divisions between men than with the common experiences that unite them. The movement of his love poetry's dominant philosophical concerns — from eros to caritas — reflects that development. His…

For Swinburne the element that the medieval age contributed to our culture was rich and complex. But, as we have seen, the late Middle Ages especially served Swinburne as a historical paradigm, a premodern period of relatively simple though conflicting political, social, religious, and amatory values that gave birth to…

In The Tale of Balen, Swinburne once again confronts and overturns the typically Victorian idealization of medieval times, particularly the "Golden Age" of Arthur. In his conception of history as essentially cyclical, this age, like any other, is characterized by the agonies of disappointed love, by travail and…

In Swinburne's philosophy the world is depicted as a single organism where all objects, all phenomena, and all contraries are inseparably interrelated in the paradoxical, beneficent tragedy we call mutability. The human spirit yearns passionately but vainly for absolute and permanent union with the beloved and with the…

Love, which normally describes sensation, in Tristram also describes the set of forces by which all the world becomes dialectical process. That which is usually viewed as static must be perceived as being in a state of constant transformation. Such perception of Love's activity in the world requires conscious and eager…

In Kierkegaardian terms, Tristram is a knight of infinite resignation. Not always content, as Swinburne declared himself to be, accepting the "absolute mystery" of destiny, he nonetheless rejoices in the experiences and visions of nature's unity that his fate allows him. Although he alternates between triumph and grief,…

In spite of the epic qualities of Tristram, Swinburne's first description of the poem as a "moral history" may be the most useful, because he believed that the Tristram legend and the courtly mythology that inspired it embody the highest laws that govern men's lives, those of Love and Fate. His primary intent was to…

In writing Tristram of Lyonesse, Swinburne found the perfect opportunity for a complete formulation of the unique synthesis of passion, pantheism, and the courtly love ethos upon which his most important philosophical intuitions were primarily founded. At the same time, however, he felt that the myth needed to be restored…

Although Tristram does not adhere strictly to the conventional criteria for narrative and epic poetry by which early critics evaluated it, and in spite of Swinburne's own disclaimers, his highly wrought masterwork is indeed a species of epic, and as such it is an undeniably successful and unified tour de force. Not indeed…

One significant characteristic, however, that distinguishes Swinburne — and indeed all the Pre-Raphaelite poets — from their Romantic forebears as well as the other most distinguished Victorian poets is their unquestioning faith in the power and value of art and the imagination that can successfully shape it.

As a Dionysian torchbearer for what in Victorian England was stridently disparaged as the devil's party, he attains legitimacy through his own insistent historical self-consciousness, as well as through the various virtues of his seductive artistry. Swinburne's strategy for thus demonstrating his prophetic vocation — his…

Like some late-twentieth-century historical thinkers, Swinburne perceived the extent to which the writing of history is a creative act: ultimately the historian is an artist and mythmaker.

For Swinburne art was a very real sphere of life, the only one in fact where the truly binding relations among types and qualities of experience, what Randolph Hughes terms the "multiform unity of inclusion" , can be purely expressed without reduction. Art to be great must be open-ended and allinclusive, a source of…

In his 1860 notebook essay on Joinville, Swinburne gropes toward this fundamentally Romantic ideal of literary history: "The debatable ground between history and biography is a ground attractive to all men for all reasons. It seems likely to give us a true and clear notion of all that lies choked in an overgrowth of…

Before we proceed with such an exploration, some explanation of Swinburne's special interest in medieval French literature is in order. More than in medieval Italian, German, or even English poetry, Swinburne found in the literary traditions descended from the troubadours, at least in potential, a system of amatory,…

As a cohesive body of materials, Swinburne's medievalist poems therefore represent systematically and coherently his moral, literary, philosophical, and religious values, as they take on varied shapes and emphases during his career. This body of works, when set against the poetry of his contemporaries, fully demonstrates…

Using the traditions of love poetry that originated in late-medieval France, and especially the Arthurian matter that represents the culmination of such traditions, Swinburne perceived that he could unveil the universal truths of human experience for the medieval era that otherwise would remain buried beneath the surfaces…

"One of Swinburne's most important intuitions," Murdoch insists, "is that discoveries are not made at the end of something, or even along the way, but at the beginning. So, . . . his poetry is constantly turning back upon itself in an attempt to reveal the significance of something in the past, something that he has…

Although Swinburne has an appropriate critical respect for the greatness of Dante's work, Villon — whose poems Swinburne often translated — is his favorite among the "Trinity" because of his earthy and rebellious vigor. Despite the similarities between Swinburne's own and Dante's social stations, Swinburne felt a strong…