Date of Submission
Spring 2018
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Literature
Project Advisor 1
Natalie Prizel
Abstract/Artist's Statement
At its core, this project seeks to examine the veracity of identifying love and sex as inextricable concepts within romantic relationships. Locating this exploration in the study of Victorian poetry, various poems from A.C. Swinburne’s “Poems and Ballads” and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s elegy “In Memoriam A.H.H.” provide portraits of love with and without consummation. The first chapter focuses its gaze upon Swinburne’s poems, where consummation in romantic relationships erodes love and causes love’s inability to survive through time. The second chapter analyzes “In Memoriam A.H.H.” and its portrayal of loving, even after the death of the beloved. Ultimately, after considering love in tandem with consummation and love without consummation, poetry is established as the method through which love can endure the passage of time.
Open Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Berry, Julia E., "Love, Kissed into Verse: Swinburne, Tennyson, and the Failure of Love in Consummation Versus the Triumph of Love Through Time in Poetry" (2018). Senior Projects Spring 2018. 154.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2018/154
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
Included in
English Language and Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons