Barry Millington, The Fleshly School: Wagner and Swinburne

The reaction of Victorian England to the iconoclastic, transgressive work of Richard Wagner is a complex one running the gamut from wild enthusiasm to unbridled hostility, with many shades of ambivalence in between. One poet in particular, Algernon Charles Swinburne, offers particularly fertile ground for an investigation of parallels and divergences between contemporaries in different but related genres, and this study sets out to trace the influence of Wagner on Swinburne in more detail than has been previously attempted.