![]() ![]() But this erotic beating was also closely intertwined with Swinburne’s poetics and conceptions of rhythm―as he reclaimed the pun on metrical feet so frequently used in both Greek and Latin poetry. 2 This pun on the French mère/mer is found in “The Triumph of Time”, for instance on l.294 “o mother, (.)ĥ Not only does this excerpt conjure up and intermingle Swinburne’s “sea complex” which Gaston Bachelard convincingly related to a longing for the mother figure (the great “Mother” to take up Swinburne’s own pun 2 ), the cleaving imagery here symbolically repeats the castration of Uranus whose sperm formed the spume or foam of the sea from which Aphrodite emerges and on which her feet symbolically lay.Ħ This article aims to explore the key role played by the eroticizing of feet in the libidinal economy of Swinburne’s early “pagan” poetry, focusing both on foot fetishism and on related imagery of masochistic trampling which provide an interesting variation on his well-known algolagnia or flagellating fantasies. ![]() With this reading in mind, the reference to the Venus Anadyomene, “sea-born” from the castration of the God of the sky, appears all the more significant. Freud understood foot fetishism as a compensatory response to infantile confrontation with the castration complex (that is, with the absent phallus of the mother). (1.624-6, 123)ģ According to Turley, Keats focuses “on Diana’s feet” as a “fetishized substitute for the missing phallus” in order “to avoid unpleasant thoughts of castration” (95)―drawing on Freud’s analysis of fetishism as the displacement of sexual desire onto inanimate body parts (and feet in particular). More bluely vein’d, more soft, more whitely sweet, However nowhere does Turley relate the Romantic poet’s foot obsession with his fascination with antiquity, although many of the examples quoted are explicitly pagan―for instance the comparison of Diana’s and Venus’ feet in Book one of Endymion : (l.1-6, 340)Ģ In a much more recent essay devoted to Keats’s “boyish, fetishist erotics” (Turley 100) and entitled “‘Strange longings’: Keats and Feet”, Richard Marggraf Turley suggests that Keats’s supposed poetic effeminacy may be partly reflected in his regressive podophiliac fantasies. ![]() If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd, If he was certainly right about the importance of Venuses in Keats’s and Swinburne’s poetry, revealing their more “feminine” Hellenism, Etienne probably also had a point about feet: these indeed play a crucial role in the works of the two poets, as epitomized by Keats’s famous address to “the naked foot of Poesy” which he wished to free from its prosodic strictures, like Perseus liberating Andromeda: ![]() Rather than emulating the virile ideal which the ancient Greeks had set so high, Keats and Swinburne seemed indeed to have favoured excessive “crying at the feet of Venus”―an effeminate whining tendency which Etienne detected “on almost every page” (316) of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866). 1 In an article entitled “Le paganisme poétique en Angleterre” published in May 1867 in La Revue des Deux Mondes, the French literary critic Louis Etienne underlined the striking similarities between Keats’s and Swinburne’s pagan and sensual inspiration, deploring, however, the lack of manliness of their verses. ![]()
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