The lines of Swinburne's poetry delineate the poetically perverse, the metrically masochistic and the sensuously sadistic. Yet to bring the concept of ‘desire lines’ to his poetry is to tease from it a perversely chaste account of lyric community. To give his own account of what in my previous chapter was delineated as the power of poetic norms that are established not through edict but through consensus: Swinburne writes that ‘Law, not lawlessness is the natural condition of poetic life; but the law must itself be poetic and not pedantic, natural and not conventional.’ I begin this chapter by reading Swinburne's discourse on lyric contained within one of his best-known poems (from the 1866 Poems and Ballads), but then focus on a later and littleknown collection, A Century of Roundels (first published in 1883), to argue that what Swinburne develops here is a ‘desire lines’ of lyric community. In this way, the chapter reconsiders work from a critically neglected volume in its own right but also suggests that it can be used to better illuminate the nature and effect of some of the complexities of genre experimentation found in Swinburne's earlier work.

Swinburne represents clearly a turning point, poetically, from the mid-nineteenth century to the late that marks the start of the (broadly aestheticist) period of lyric that I trace in this study. He is best known for what are often now called his long ‘dramatic monologues’ (a category retrospectively applied to Swinburne's poetry), but he was also credited with the beginnings of English Parnassianism. It is the ‘dramatic’ rather than the ‘lyric’ that has received most attention in Swinburne's poetry in recent years, but his engagement with the fixed French forms that typified aestheticism might repay further study. After all, Poems and Ballads is, as the author himself writes in his ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ to the Collected Works, a volume of many poetic types and forms: ‘lyrical and dramatic and elegiac and generally heterogeneous’. Swinburne is particularly interested, in fact, in classifying poetry in terms of poetic type, admitting to liking the idea of seeing a poet's ‘lyric and elegiac works ranged and registered apart, each kind in a class of its own, such as is usually reserved […] for sonnets only’. Swinburne was clearly, then, a poet highly aware of the implications of genre categories.