SOURCE: "Swinburne's Dramatic Monologues: Sex and Ideology," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 175-95.

In the following essay, Morgan analyzes Algernon Charles Swinburne's critique of Victorian sexual ideology in the dramatic monologues of his Poems and Ballads.

In reply to Victorian critics who found Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866) both "indecent" and "blasphemous," Algernon Charles Swinburne stated quite firmly that his poetry is "dramatic, many-faced, multifarious" and that "no utterance of enjoyment or despair, belief or unbelief, can properly be assumed as the assertion of its author's personal feeling or faith."¹ This public defense in Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866) establishes Swinburne's own definition of the mask or the fictional persona and shows that he was deliberately working with the dramatic monologue as a genre in his first collection of poems. Moreover, Swinburne was sensitive to the difference between the distancing of poet from fictional persona in...