Selected Verse

About Algernon Charles Swinburne

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE was born in London in 1837 to an aristocratic family. He spent much of his childhood at the family home on the Isle of Wight and was educated at Eton from 1849 to 1853. In 1856 he entered Balliol College Oxford. He failed his examinations in Classics passing on a second attempt and in 1860 he left the University without sitting Finals. At Oxford the young Swinburne had made the acquaintance of D. G. Rossetti and William Morris both of whom had a substantial influence upon his literary work and Edward Burne-Jones to whom he would dedicate his first collection of poems. Among this Pre-Raphaelite circle he lived in London sharing a house with Rossetti for a brief time and associating with many leading figures of the Aesthetic Movement. His first publication in 1860 was a volume containing two verse dramas Rosamund and The Queen Mother; but it was his second publication Atalanta in Calydon (1865) which established his reputation as an important poet. With Rossetti as an advocate he followed this success in the following year with a collection Poems and Ballads which made him the most controversial English poet of the day. Readers were struck delighted and appalled by his virtuosic prosody his penchant for perverse and decadent subjects and his overt anti-Christian sentiments. Many other volumes followed including Songs Before Sunrise (1871) two more series of Poems and Ballads (1878 and 1889) the Arthurian epic Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) and several verse plays. He was also an important critic and published book-length studies of Blake Chapman Hugo Shakespeare and Jonson besides many other critical essays. During his two decades in London (1860-1879) his bohemian lifestyle was infamous and the period was marred by ill-health and alcoholism. In 1879 his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton brought Swinburne to his own home in Putney where he could be looked after. Here Swinburne remained still writing until his death in 1909.