Esoteric victorians: the hermetic and the arcane in the poetry of Browning, Rossetti and Swinburne

Abstract

The esoteric imaginary has been present in English literature and culture from the very beginning. It emerges in the medieval occultists Merlin and Morgan Le Fay, proceeding to the Renaissance figure of Sir Thomas Browne, an hermetic philosopher, and to the Metaphysical poets, then flowering in William Blake’s esoteric mythologies of the early 19th century. It surfaces the poetry of all the major Romantics of the first and second generations, and it witnesses a revival at the fin de siècle, through the creation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the occultist and astrological explorations of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats. This imaginary comes to the 20th century by the hands of esoteric poets such as Robert Graves, Edith Sitwell and Ted Hughes. In this paper I will focus not so much on these eventually more well-known examples but on how another apparently inconspicuous group, constituted by mid and late Victorian artists and poets, responded to certain figures and symbols of the hermetic and mystical traditions, in a time when empirical science and industrial progress generally demanded rational and utilitarian views of the arts. By looking at passages in the poems of Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, amongst others in the period, I hope to show how these Victorians absorbed earlier esoteric elements and themselves influenced later modern manifestations, through their interest in analysing, representing and commenting upon the different ways in which obscure and arcane forms of knowledge can affect human experience and development.