“The long history of English elegy is a shedding of fresh tears into ancient vessels,” says Rosenberg in “Elegy for an Age.” Indeed, the elegy seems the best literary form to exemplify Eliot's famous statement that “No poet, no artist of any art, possesses his complete meaning alone. Its meaning, its appreciation is the appreciation of its relationship with the dead poets and artists.” We might go so far as to say that throughout the history of English literature, writers have shed their "fresh tears" into the "ancient vessels" that are those writers who came before them. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay A particularly important example of this is Algernon Charles Swinburne's elegy "Ave Atque Vale", dedicated to Baudelaire. Within his poetry, Swinburne not only references and references Baudelaire's work but also a number of Greek myths and legends, which Homer and Ovid among others wrote about; generating the question, what is your intent in doing so? TS Eliot seems to argue that relating to or acknowledging dead poets and artists is a genuine appreciation of their work and at the same time a kind of enrichment for current work. Where this is certainly a susceptible point of view, there is an additional dimension to this literary trend. Being an elegy, 'Ave Aque Vale' naturally conveys a sense of personal loss to the reader, but in a broader sense, Swinburne's appreciation for Baudelaire's life and work in an elegy is a way through the which can effectively put Baudelaire to rest and insert fits into a pattern of Harold Bloom-style canonical writers, confirming himself as the next in line of tradition. Eliot's statement is certainly true, in the sense that it is a mistake to suggest that any writer or artist can create a totally pure work; that is, one who is absolutely unmarred by the influence of the artists who came before them (the influence on their work is of course appreciation for the dead artist). This explains to some extent why writers of the same era are often cited collectively; the similarities between their writings arise from the influence they exerted on each other, either deliberately or unconsciously. Consequently, Eliot's notion of completeness rings true. A reader cannot hope to fully understand or understand a piece of literature if the writer's allusions to other works are not understood or ignored. For example, Swinburne refers in the second stanza to "Lesbian Headlands," a line that alludes to Baudelaire's "Lesbos." It is a poem that in the final part depicts the death of Sappho, the Greek poet who was said to have committed suicide by throwing herself from the Leucadian rocks, an allusion that thus gives an acute sense of tragedy to Baudelaire's death, a tone that would have escaped to the reader if he does not understand the nature of this reference. Furthermore, from these allusions emerges an evident chain that runs through the history of literary works and elegies in particular. Where Swinburne pays homage to Baudelaire, Baudelaire pays homage to Sappho, and after Swinburne's death, Thomas Hardy pays homage to him in the elegy "A Sleeping Singer". The critic Yopie Prins comments on the idea of ​​"poetic vocation" in Thomas Brennan's essay Creation from Nothing, suggesting that Swinburne's allusion to Sappho "allows him to articulate the recurring structure of the poetic vocation: the poet's body is sacrificed to her song, and this body is sacrificed to posterity, who collect its scattered fragments to remember Sappho herself as the lost origin of lyric poetry.'While this comment is specific to Sappho, it seems to apply more broadly to the tradition of poets elegying other poets, where the elegy can be seen as a kind of portrait to immortalize the dead artist after his physical being has passed away. Considering the context in which Swinburn was writing, his elegy to Baudelaire could also be an act of moral obligation. As Rosenberg comments in Elegy for an Age, the Victorian era was in a period between a "vanishing past and an uncertain future", moving towards a modernist period in which many people abandoned religion and God in favor of atheism or agnosticism. This is especially evident in "Ave Atque Vale" with the absence of the traditional Christian God or the mention of heaven in a poem that is effectively funereal, replaced by the idea that Baudelaire will not ascend to heaven, but will be immortalized by joining a league of great poets before him: "holy pages of poets". Therefore, it becomes Swinburne's duty, in the absence of God, to confirm through his elegy Baudelaire's place as one of the great poets. In the very act of anointing Baudelaire and appreciating him in this way, Swinburne's significance as a poet is enhanced by the reader's assumption that he is qualified to determine who is and who is not a great or significant writer. consider Swinburne's elegy as a form of inserting himself into the literary canon and perhaps even replacing Baudelaire in his death. In the essay Brennan establishes that the traditional implication of critics such as Harold Bloom is that Swinburne's allusions to Baudelaire are a means for him to "make room in the tradition for his own efforts." In a structural sense, this notion is supported by Swinburne's physical placement of the Baudelaire extract at the beginning of his poem, before his own writing, an act that could be seen to indicate Swinburne's intention to follow the poet and become his heir. Furthermore, the poem begins with Swinburne asking "shall I strew thee rose, rue, or laurel" and closes with him giving the "garland" and proclaiming "farewell," a clear chronology that gives the elegy a funereal purpose of laying to rest Baudelaire, thus making way for Swinburne as the new poet. By eulogizing a canonical writer like Baudelaire, Swinburne once again heightens his own significance as a writer by automatically becoming next in line: “my flying song flies behind.” However, this is not to say that Swinburne's elegy does not appreciate Baudelaire and his work, as T.S. Eliot suggests a writer should, and Brennan seems right in his essay to reject the idea that elegy is a genre "competitive". This notion seems to be a mistake for two reasons. The first is that the competition is problematic when a participant is deceased; the word implies a constant struggle to outdo the other, while Swinburne seems simply eager to continue in Baudelaire's footsteps. Secondly, if Swinburne's intention was indeed to fire and replace Baudelaire, it would be illogical to compose an elegy rather than a critique, for example. Swinburne places great emphasis on the image of Baudelaire as silent in his death, "unmelodious mouth", "silent soul", something which functions as a kind of self-promotion in suggesting that it will be Swinburne himself who will carry on his "song" rather than replacing it. Returning to Swinburne's references to Baudelaire throughout the poem, these are often vague and his allusions might escape a less critical reader. Therefore, this calls into question whether poetry can actually have meaning without understanding the influence of dead poets on it. If by “meaning” we examine what Swinburne is trying to communicate to his.