Swinburne’s "Ave Atque Vale" and the Role of the Dead in the Construction of the Canon Anonymous College

‘The long history of English elegy is a pouring of fresh tears into ancient vessels,’claims Rosenberg in ‘Elegy for an Age.’ Indeed, the elegy seems the best literary form to exemplify Eliot’s famous claim that “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” We might go as far to say that throughout the history of English Literature, writers have poured their ‘fresh tears’ into the ‘ancient vessels’ which are those writers who have preceded them.

One particularly prominent example of this is Algernon Charles Swinburne’s elegy ‘Ave Atque Vale,’ dedicated to Baudelaire. Within his poem, Swinburne not only refers and relates to Baudelaire’s work but also to a number of Greek myths and legends, of which Homer and Ovid amongst others wrote about; generating the question, what is his intent in doing so? T.S Eliot seems to argue that relating to or acknowledging dead poets and artists is both a genuine appreciation of their work whilst being a kind of enrichment to the present work. Where this is certainly an amenable viewpoint, there is an additional dimension to this literary trend. Being an elegy, ‘Ave Aque Vale’...