Algernon Swinburne

Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), English poet noted for libertarian themes and stylistic virtuosity.

Swinburne was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford. In 1860 he published the two verse dramas The Queen Mother and Rosamond. Settling in London, he began a long association with the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and also formed friendships with the writers William Morris and George Meredith. Swinburne’s choral verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865) gained him immediate fame. This poem was an ambitious attempt to reproduce the form and spirit of Greek tragedy, and it demonstrated the poet’s extraordinary gift for sustained verbal melody.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866) created one of the most famous literary scandals of the Victorian period. Swinburne attempted to celebrate physical love and the life of the senses in the spirit of the ancient Greek lyric poets and certain French contemporaries. Some of the poems with their open display of masochism demonstrate his tendency to shock:

The political poems contained in Songs Before Sunrise (1871) were inspired in part by Swinburne’s admiration for the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. They range from a lofty tribute to democracy and political liberty to a vague and excited approval of revolution. One of his last major poetic works, Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878), contains the moving elegy “Ave Atque Vale”, written in praise of the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Swinburne wrote many elegies, including one for Robert Browning.

By 1879 Swinburne’s pleasure-seeking lifestyle and his addiction to alcohol had caused his health to decline seriously, and he moved into the Putney home of his friend, the critic and poet Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton. Swinburne recovered and lived the rest of his life under Watts-Dunton’s care. In the latter part of his career, criticism as well as verse occupied his energies. He wrote detailed and imaginative studies of Elizabethan drama in the Study of Shakespeare (1880) and The Age of Shakespeare (1909). His other notable works include the series of tragic verse dramas Chastelard (1865), Bothwell (1874), and Mary Stuart (1881).

Swinburne’s reputation as a great poet rests upon a number of poems, such as Atalanta in Calydon,”Dolores” (1866), “Laus Veneris” (1866), and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). A writer of brilliant technical resources, he controlled the music of verse with total authority, and his experiments in the use of metre and rhyme produced a wide range of original poetic effects. From being the shocking figurehead of modernity in the 1860s, by the end of his life Swinburne became both esteemed and tamed. As Queen Victoria said: “I am told that Mr Swinburne is the best poet in my dominions.”