“Ruined at Root”: “The Triumph of Time,” “Anactoria,” and Swinburne’s Poetics of Waste

The question of what poetry should be used for was rife throughout the middle of the nineteenth century. This essay examines one poet’s response to what poetry is and why it should matter: Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne is a particularly interesting case study because of the excessive and immoderate reactions his work provoked in his admirers and his critics alike, and because his poetry is often thematically, stylistically, and formally concerned with waste, a word often applied as the antithesis of “useful.” Memorably, his contemporaries responded to his early poetry by describing him “tuning his lyre in a stye” and deeming him “rose graftings set in dung.” I argue that, for Swinburne, waste functions in his poems as both a mode of relation and a theory of poetics, and the two dovetail in my reading of “The Triumph of Time” and “Anactoria.” What is at stake for Swinburne in his investigation is poetry’s capacity for creating and evolving alternate forms of intimacy. I end by speculating about how his poetry encourages us to rethink or challenge an investment in voice originating in a human speaker.