Dr Michael Craske is a Senior Lecturer in the English department at Queen Mary University of London. He researches the intersection of poetry and music, and has published on the poetry and life of A. C. Swinburne, the music of Richard Wagner, the Decadent poets Arthur Symons and Theodore Wratislaw, and on issues in musical aesthetics and ideas about ‘Absolute Music’ found in the late work of Vernon Lee.

Currently, he is researching the novels of the Revd Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) with the aim of republishing Baring-Gould’s shocking and once-famous Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes (1880).

Before academia, he was involved in diplomacy of a Middle Eastern kind, for what seemed like a very long time…

Forthcoming and recent publications:

• Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes by Sabine Baring-Gould, edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Craske (c.2027-8), Jewelled Tortoise Series no. 15, Modern Humanities Research Association. 
• ‘The Music of the Venusberg: Richard Wagner and the Poetry of Arthur Symons’, Salome’s Bookshelf: Artists and Writers of the 1890s (2025). 
• ‘Of Lips and Angels: The Rossettis at Tate Britain; Evelyn De Morgan: The Gold Drawings at Leighton House’, CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures, Vol.2.1, (Winter 2024), pp. 145-150.
• ‘Lying Down or Standing Up for Music: Hearing and Listening in Vernon Lee’s Music and its Lovers’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, Vol. 5.2 (2022), pp. 83-101.
• ‘“Let us adore spilled blood”: Swinburne and the Scandal of Poems and Ballads’, Routledge Handbook of Scandals in Victorian Literature and Culture (2023). 
• ‘“A Genius for Inaccuracy”: Edmund Gosse and the Case of Swinburne’s Missing “Ear”’, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2022). 
• ‘Dannreuther’s Hidden Swinburne References Signal Artistic Kinship’, Notes & Queries (2019). 
• ‘Swinburne, Wagner, Eliot, and the Musical Legacy of Poems and Ballads’, Journal of Victorian Culture (2018).

Reviews:

Summer 2024

Review of The Oxford Handbook of Decadence, ed. by Jane Desmarais and David Weir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, 9 (Summer, 2024), 175-178.

Spring 2024

Review of Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt by Eleanor Dobson (London: UCL Press, 2022), in Victorian Popular Fictions, Vol. 6.1, 131-2.

Autumn 2022

Review of Music and the Queer Body in English Literature by Fraser Riddell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, 7 (Autumn, 2022), 156-160.

Autumn 2021

Review of Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt, ed. by Eleanor Dobson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020) and Late Victorian Orientalism: Representations of the East in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art, And Culture from the Pre-Raphaelites to John La Farge, ed. by Eleonara Sasso (London: Anthem Press, 2020), Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, 6 (Autumn, 2021), 159-166.

December 2020

Review of Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity by Jeremy Coleman for Volupté: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 3.2, 150-152.

Autumn 2018

Review of Elizabeth K. Helsinger’s Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015), in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, 3 (Autumn, 2018), 166-169

To read my PhD research, follow the link here:

Swinburne and Wagner: Poetry and Music

Or click to download here: Swinburne and Wagner