The Evolution of Forms

“Decadence Curiously Reprised:
Arthur Rackham’s Illustrations of A. C. Swinburne’s Child Poems”

In 1918 Edmund Gosse published Springtide of Life, a collection of Swinburne’s child poems of the late 1870s and 1880s, lavishly illustrated by Arthur Rackham. In his preface Gosse writes that the collection brought to fruition Swinburne’s “wish and design,” which he himself had been unable to realize before his death (v). Rackham’s illustrations in particular, Gosse claims, would have suited the poet because Rackham was “one whose delicate and romantic fancy is in sensitive harmony with Swinburne’s, and who understands, no less than he did, how ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy’” (vi). Focusing on the interplay of Swinburne’s text and Rackham’s images, I examine Springtide of Life’s amalgamation of the trite and the taboo. Skirting the line between mawkish sentimentality and perverse eroticism, Swinburne’s child poems are often dismissed as belonging to the poet’s declining years, written mostly after he moved to Putney, eschewing his wild habits and losing his aesthetic edge under the watchful eye of Theodore Watts-Dunton. Yet, if they do not always achieve the formal sophistication and provocative perversity of “Laus Veneris” or “Dolores,” say, they nonetheless continue to explore fraught themes of masochistic desire through typically lush, sensual imagery. The poems in Springtide of Life fetishize childhood and children, offering paeans not merely to the divinity of childish innocence in the Romantic tradition of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” but to the desirability of infant flesh, “of all its dainty body, honey-sweet” (“Herse,” line 28), and to the pleasures of the child’s unconscious despotism (“A child to command and control me,/ Bid come and remain at his call” [“Dark Month” xxiv, lines 3– 4]). Rackham’s images create uncanny echoes of Swinburne’s verse, marketing to a new generation not just the fetishized child but, seemingly, the perverse poet himself, whose likeness may be seen in the impish, red-haired angel and piper figures that appear throughout. The curious combination of text and image, I argue, reprises fin-de-siècle Decadence as a commodity for a “post-Victorian” readership.

Read Dr. Anna Maria Jones's essay below.

The PowerPoint below is a supplement to Dr. Jones's essay.

"Jacques Stephen Alexis, President General Trujillo, and the Creolization
of the Haitian and Dominican Peoples in General Sun, My Brother."

In 1937, President General Trujillo solidified both the geographic and cultural boarders between Haiti and the Dominican Republic with his ordering of the “Parsley” Massacre. During this time, an estimated 15,000 Haitians were systematically and brutally murdered by Trujillo’s men while many other Haitians were forced to flee across the once open border between the two nations. The Parsley Massacre forever changed the way both Haitians and Dominicans viewed the real and imagined boundaries between their two cultures and is often referenced in literary works from both nations. This article examines Haitian writer and political activist Jacques Stephen Alexis’ 1955 novel, General Sun, My Brother, and his portrayal of the relationship between the Haitian and Dominican people both prior to and during the Parsley Massacre. In examining the way Alexis portrays the boundaries and interactions between the Haitian and Dominican people throughout the novel, I conclude that Alexis is advocating for the creolization, rather than the separation, of these two peoples and their cultures. Despite his Haitian ancestry and the violent ending of General Sun, My Brother, Alexis’ true focus throughout the novel is on uniting the Haitian and Dominican people and celebrating the shared creolization of their cultures. Using Alexis’ political speech “Prolegomena to a Manifesto on the Marvellous Realism of the Haitians” as a reference point for his ideas of Third-World Marxism and creolization, I argue that General Sun, My Brother is Alexis’ literary attempt to challenge the physical and cultural boundaries imposed by Trujillo’s regime.

Read Ileia Mooney's essay below.

"Singing out of Tune:
The Evolving Images of Yone Noguchi’s Poetry."

An examination of formal innovations in modernist poetics provides an opportunity to turn critical attention to Yone Noguchi, the Japanese poet whose sojourn into the western hemisphere spanned three decades and produced a small but complex body of English-language poetry. Noguchi’s contemporaries, though appreciative of the unrestrained lines and sublime natural imagery his poems contained, dismissed its more problematic elements as proof of the poet’s exoticism, thus eschewing the chance to see him as more than a poet of “quaint and delicate flowers.” Noguchi’s sweeping verses, though replete with vibrant natural images, reveal an abiding psychological tension that stems from the poet’s own sense of placelessness. Noguchi locates meaning outside of linguistic or spatial boundaries, resulting in radically discursive images that detect and pursue contested spaces of identity creation. The landscapes in Noguchi’s poetic corpus, often labyrinthine and ambiguous, move frequently and unexpectedly beyond the physical world into a realm where abstraction reigns and signification becomes unclear. This poetic fragmentation reifies the defining characteristics of Noguchi’s experience in the West, such as his alienation and struggle against psychological and cultural boundaries. By exploring the nature of Noguchi’s poetic images, I demonstrate the ways they reveal his personal and political displacement while evolving into a decidedly modern aesthetic. The dynamic energy of Noguchi’s poetic vision prefigures the innovations of twentieth-century imagists and argues anew for sustained attention to his influence on modernist poetics.

Read Sean Porterfield's essay below.