Swinburne, Algernon Charles

Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837–1909), educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was associated with Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Atalanta in Calydon (1865), a drama in classical Greek form with choruses that revealed his great metrical skills, brought him celebrity. Chastelard (1865), the first of three dramas on the subject of Mary Queen of Scots, raised doubts about the morality of Swinburne's verse, doubts reinforced by the first series of Poems and Ballads (1866), which brought down a torrent of abuse from R. Buchanan, J. Morley, and others. The volume contains many of his best as well as his most notorious poems (‘Dolores’, ‘Itylus’, ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, ‘The Triumph of Time’, ‘Faustine’, ‘Laus Veneris’, etc.) which clearly demonstrate the preoccupation with de Sade, masochism, and femmes fatales, and also his outspoken repudiation of Christianity. A Song of Italy (1867) and Songs before Sunrise (1871) express his support for Mazzini in the struggle for Italian independence, and a hatred of authority which owes much to Blake. Bothwell (1874) and a second Greek drama, Erechtheus (1876), were followed by the more subdued Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878), which contains ‘A Forsaken Garden’. By this time Swinburne's health was seriously undermined by heavy drinking and other excesses. In 1879 he moved to Putney with his friend Watts-Dunton, who gradually weaned him from drink and restored his health. He published many more volumes, including Mary Stuart (1881), Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882), Marino Faliero (1885, a tragedy on the same subject as Byron's of the same title), and Poems and Ballads: Third Series (1889), but they lack the force of his earlier work.

Swinburne commanded an impressive variety of verse forms, writing in classical metres, composing burlesques, modern and mock-antique ballads, roundels, etc.; he also translated the ballads of Villon. His influence on fellow aesthetes like Pater and a later generation of poets was considerable. Swinburne was a critic of perception and originality; his studies of Chapman (1875), Marlowe (1883, Encyclopaedia Britannica), Middleton (1887), Tourneur (1889, EB), and others were the first important successors to Lamb in the revival of interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

His letters were edited in 6 vols, 1959–62, by C. Y. Lang. Many of his writings remain unpublished, presumably unpublishable.