My essay on Edmund Gosse’s malign influence on Swinburne studies, both biographical and critical, is now available on the website of the International Walter Pater Society.

‘“A Genius for Inaccuracy”: Edmund Gosse and the Case of Swinburne’s Missing Musical “Ear”’ overturns claims that the poet was unable to appreciate music on its own terms, was tone deaf, or musically illiterate. The original source of these claims was Edmund Gosse, Swinburne’s first biographer, who bizarrely stated that the poet was driven ‘wild with petulance and impatience’ on hearing a ‘performance on any instrument’ – an intriguing comment considering Swinburne’s poetry has so often been likened to musical production and is ‘everywhere inflected with a musical vocabulary’, to quote Jerome McGann.

While my essay examines Gosse’s ‘musical’ anecdotes about Swinburne in detail, it also critiques Gosse’s general methodology for The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1917), demonstrating how he viewed his biographical writing as a form of ‘natural history’. Perhaps taking inspiration from the works of his naturalist father, Philip Gosse (who used to explore rockpools and paint extraordinary but abstracted versions of their inhabitants to illustrate his naturalist works, such as A Year at the Shore (1865)), I show that Gosse was more interested in painting Swinburne’s ‘glowing colours’ and creating a “‘piquant cartoon'” rather than dealing with more prosaic details, such as facts.

The article also looks at Swinburne’s collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan, Love Laid His Sleepless Head, a song written for an 1874 London production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Categories: music, poetry

Tags: Algernon Swinburne, Arthur Sullivan, Biography, Edmund Gosse, Philip Gosse, Poems and Ballads, Swinburne