Algernon Charles Swinburne

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

English poet and critic, outstanding for prosodic innovations and noteworthy as the symbol of mid-Victorian poetic revolt. The characteristic qualities of his verse are insistent alliteration, unflagging rhythmic energy, sheer melodiousness, great variation of pace and stress, effortless expansion of a given theme, and evocative if rather imprecise use of imagery. His poetic style is highly individual and his command of word-colour and word-music striking. Swinburne's technical gifts and capacity for prosodic invention were extraordinary, but too often his poems' remorseless rhythms have a narcotic effect, and he has been accused of paying more attention to the melody of words than to their meaning.

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 (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 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. Swinburne wrote many elegies, including one for Robert Browning.

By 1879 Swinburne's pleasure-seeking lifestyle 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 meter and rhyme produced a wide range of original poetic effects.

Lecture 7

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