ABSTRACT
When Swinburne denounced Christianity in the late 1850s, he was also compelled to denounce the Judeo-Christian myth of creation. For Swinburne, as Ross Murfin notes, the Christian God was “a sick and dying God whom man, out of his own insecurity, once created in his own image” (108). Naturally, such God was a weak and limited deity, and the thought that he was the source of all things created seemed absurd to Swinburne. The lack of an alternative creation myth did not appear to be a central issue in the earlier poems of the 1860s, when Swinburne was blinded by a nihilistic anti-Christian rage, and enjoyed ruthlessly mocking Christianity’s myths and theological conceptions. And yet, as Swinburne came to realize later in his career, unless he managed to develop an alternative myth of origin, he could never truly free himself from Christian theology and metaphysics. This need became urgent during the 1870s with the publication of his political poetry, where Swinburne wished to establish a republican myth of creation that was not bound by Christian morality. Like Blake, Swinburne associated political and spiritual tyranny, and knew that in order to free humanity from oppressive forces, he had to establish a new creation myth.
