Algernon Swinburne
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Algernon Swinburne, Portrait by Rossetti |
Algernon Charles Swinburne (
April 5,
1837 –
April 10,
1909) was a
Victorian era English poet. His
poetry was highly controversial in its day, much of it containing recurring themes of
sadomasochism, death-wish,
lesbianism and anti-
Christian sentiments.
Swinburne was born in
London, and raised on the
Isle of Wight, and at
Capheaton Hall, near
Wallington,
Northumberland. He attended
Eton college and then
Balliol College, Oxford but had the rare distinction (like
Oscar Wilde) of being
rusticated from the university in 1859. He was associated with the
Pre-Raphaelite movement, and counted among his best friends
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
He is considered a
decadent poet, albeit that he professed to perhaps rather more vice than he actually indulged in, a fact which
Oscar Wilde notably and acerbically commented upon.
Many of his early and still admired poems evoke the Victorian fascination with the
Middle Ages, and some of them are explicitly
medieval in style, tone and construction, these representatives notably being "The Leper," "Laus Veneris," and "St Dorothy".
He was an
alcoholic and a highly excitable character. His health suffered as a result, until he finally broke down and was taken into care by his friend
Theodore Watts, who looked after him for the rest of his life in
Putney. Thereafter he lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability.
His
vocabulary,
rhyme and
metre arguably make him one of the best poets of the
English language; but his poetry has been criticized as overly flowery and meaningless, choosing words to fit the rhyme rather than to contribute towards meaning.
Works include:
Atalanta in Calydon,
Tristram of Lyonesse,
Poems and Ballads (series I, II and III -- these contain most of his more controversial works),
Songs Before Sunrise,
Lesbia Brandon (novel published posthumously).
He also wrote poems in favour of the unification of
Italy, particularly in the volume
Songs before Sunrise. His work was very popular among undergraduates at
Oxford and
Cambridge, though today it has largely gone out of fashion. This, at least, is the current popular and even the academic view of the decline of Swinburne's reputation, but it contains some distortion.
In fact Swinburne's
Poems and Ballads, First Series and his
Atalanta in Calydon have never been out of critical favor. It was Swinburne's misfortune that the two works, published when he was nearly 30, soon established him as England's premier poet, the successor to
Alfred, Lord Tennyson and
Robert Browning. This was a position he held in the popular mind until his death, but sophisticated critics like
A. E. Housman felt, rightly or wrongly, that the job of being one of England's very greatest poets was beyond him.
Swinburne may have felt this way himself. He was a highly intelligent man and in later life a much-respected critic, and he himself believed that the older a man was, the more cynical and less trustworthy he became. Swinburne may have been one of the first people not to trust anyone over thirty. This of course created problems for him after he himself passed that age.
After the first
Poems and Ballads, Swinburne's later poetry is devoted more to politics and philosophy. He does not utterly stop writing love poetry, but he is far less shocking. His versification, and especially his rhyming technique, remain masterful to the end. He is the virtual star of the third volume of
George Saintsbury's famous
History of English Prosody, and Housman, a more measured and even somewhat hostile critic, devoted paragraphs of praise to his rhyming ability.
Some of his poems:
*
Hymn to Proserpine*
The Triumph of TimeA modern study of his religious attitudes:
Swinburne and His Gods: the Roots and Growth of an Agnostic Poetry by Margot Kathleen Louis (ISBN 0773507159)
*
Ernest Wheldrake was a fictional character invented by Swinburne, who reviewed imaginary works by him. This was as a satire on the
spasmodic poets. Wheldrake is also a character used by
Michael Moorcock in his fiction.
*
The Algernon Charles Swinburne Archive: A digital archive of the life and works of Algernon Charles Swinburne
*
Free ebook of Algernon Swinburne at
Project Gutenberg
