Swinburne reads Keats: Prostitution, pornography and the decadence of aesthetic critique

Abstract

Keats and Swinburne loom large as purveyors of the “aesthetic” in its early and late nineteenth-century forms—that is, as a discourse of subject-formation through the exercise of tasteful distinction and as a self-referential discourse of art for art’s sake, respectively. In this essay, I analyse how Swinburne constructs a “Keats” that will allow him to master a “manliness in crisis” that affected both writers. If this “crisis” is historicized by the body as a social matter that Victorian legislators were policing in the forms of prostitution and pornography, it is, I argue, this materiality that Keats and Swinburne insist of enjoying rather than sublimating. The ultimate question I pose is this: can aesthetics become the critical discourse that recent revisionary readings have postulated if both a Romantic and a Decadent aesthetic insist on enjoying the body, materiality, gender instability and other topoi communicated by prostitution, pornography and poetry.