Swinburne's debt to Baudelaire

Anthony H. Harrison, Professor of English, North Carolina State University

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Note 4, chapter 2, in the author's Swinburne's Medievalism-A Study in Victorian Love Poetry which Louisiana State University Press published in 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

See Jeunesse, 421. Further, in Notes on Poems and Reviews (Hyder [ed.], Swinburne Replies, 26), Swinburne acknowledges that "Laus Veneris" owes a great deal to Baudelaire's pamphlet on Richard Wagner's opera, published on April 1, 1861. Barbara Charlesworth also briefly examines the influence of Swinburne's aestheticism (as it is expressed in the essay on Baudelaire) upon the contents of Poems and Ballads, First Series (Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature [Madison,1965], 10-21).

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Last modified June 2000