#birkbeckvoices

On Wednesday 30 January, the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies welcomed Dr. Linda Freedman (UCL) to mark the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman's birth with two papers that examined his reception in Victorian Britain. In his 1868 Essay on William Blake, Algernon Charles Swinburne closed with a comparison to Whitman in which he claimed: ‘The points of contact and sides of likeness between William Blake and Walt Whitman are so many and so grave, as to afford some ground of reason to those who preach the transition of souls or transfusion of spirits.’ For Swinburne, they were prophets of democracy and he, like many of the international avant-garde in London, put his faith in poetry, not politics, to herald a new dawn of republicanism in Britain. But when Swinburne championed Blake as a home-grown Whitman, America’s self-declared prophet of democracy was beginning to wonder whether he had been right to put his faith in poetry. The comparisons between Blake and Whitman were unequivocal and optimistic.