Sounding Swinburne

Sounding Swinburne consolidates ongoing research into a large, highly-significant body of Victorian and Edwardian music that was inspired by Swinburne’s verse. Demonstrating not only an extraordinary enthusiasm for Swinburne’s poems as music, the material (consisting of scores, which are currently being cataloged) also shows a cross-fertilization of content, style, and aesthetics that has implications not only for an analysis of Swinburne’s reception history, but also for the study of nineteenth-century and Modernist views on the relationship between poetry and song. The site illustrates the catalog with images, videos and literary sources (diaries, letters, etc.). In future, it will also curate academic papers on Swinburne and popular song (on such figures as Theo Marzials, Maude Valérie White, James Molloy, etc), and on Swinburne’s artistic relationship with nineteenth-century and later composers, such as Wagner, Granville Bantock, Vaughan Williams, William Walton, and others. PI: Michael Craske with Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary University of London).