ABSTRACT
By the time Swinburne embarked on his poetic career in earnest with the publication of Atalanta in Calydon in 1865, the monumentalisation of Alfred, Lord Tennyson as the 'poet of the age' was well advanced. O'Gorman persuasively argues that Swinburne's elegies in Poems and Ballads, Second Series evince a struggle to formulate a post-Christian 'language of regret and loss' that could rival that of Tennyson's In Memoriam. To complicate O'Gorman's model, Swinburne in these poems seems less concerned to devise alternative models of grief than to destabilise the assumption that grief, melancholy, and contemplativeness represent profound responses to mortality. Swinburne links Tennyson's project with Robert Browning's and rejects both as misbegotten efforts to be a Christian in the 'chaos' of the modern world. Swinburne's decadent use of pagan and/or Catholic imagery implies that rituals of mourning are in fact sensuous death-worship, performed 'in death's favour'.
