Swinburne

(Revision as of 06:20, 24 Sep 2004)

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 - 1909) was a Victorian era English poet and literary critic. His poetry was highly controversial in its day, although he is now considered to be one of the great poets of Brittain. He touched on many themes, including liberty, the relationship between pleasure and pain, and the psychology of sexual passion (Sabazius, 1995). He also had interest in de Sade, masochism, and femmes fatales, along with a great disdain of Christianity. He wrote poems in favour of the independence of Italy, feuled by a hatred of tyranny. Swinburn served as inspiration for many future poets, not the least of which was Aleister Crowley.

Table of contents

Overview

He was a student at Balliol College, Oxford, and his work in his day was very popular among undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge. He was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He first gained fame with Atalanta in Calydon (1865), a drama in classical Greek form.

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 poems evoke the Victorian fascination with the mediaeval period, and some of them are explicitly mediaeval 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 settled into his poetry, publishing another 23 volumes of work.

From In the Orchard

      Lie closer, lean your face upon my side,
      Feel where the dew fell that has hardly dried,
            Hear how the blood beats that went nigh to swoon;
      The pleasure lives there when the sense has died;
            Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.

      O my fair lord, I charge you leave me this:
      Is it not sweeter than a foolish kiss?
            Nay take it then, my flower, my first in June,
      My rose, so like a tender mouth it is:
            Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.

Notable poems

Hymn to Proserpine
The Triumph of Time
Dolores

Works

The Queen-Mother; Rosamond (1860)
Atalanta in Calydon (1865)
Chastelard (1865)
Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866)
Poems and Ballads [1st ser.] (1866)
A Song of Italy (1867)
Siena (1868)
William Blake (1868)
Christabel and the Lyrical and Imaginative Poems of S.T. Coleridge (1869)
Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic (1870)
Songs Before Sunrise (1871)
Under the Microscope (1872)
Bothwell (1874)
Essays and Studies (1875)
George Chapman (1875)
Songs of Two Nations (1875)
Erechtheus (1876)
Note of an English Republican on the Muscovite Crusade (1876)
A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877) NF
Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878)
The Heptalogia; or, The Seven Against Sense (1880)
Songs of the Springtides (1880)
Studies in Song (1880)
A Study of Shakespeare (1880)
Mary Stuart (1881)
Tristram of Lyonesse, and Other Poems (1882)
A Century of Roundels (1883)
A Midsummer Holiday, and Other Poems (1884)
Marino Faliero (1885)
A Study of Victor Hugo (1886)
Locrine (1887)
Poems and Ballads: Third Series (1889)
A Study of Ben Jonson (1889)
The Sisters (1892)
Astrophel, and Other Poems (1894
Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894)
The Tale of Balen (1896)
A Channel Passage (1899)
Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards (1899)
A Channel Passage, and Other Poems (1904)
Love's Cross-Currents (1905)
The Age of Shakespeare (1908)
The Duke of Gandia (1908)

External link

Project Gutenberg e-texts of works by Algernon Charles Swinburne (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/author?name=Swinburne,%20Algernon%20Charles)

References

Drabble, M. & Stringer, J. (1996). "Swinburne, Algernon Charles." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Retrieved from Oxford Reference Online (http://80-www.oxfordreference.com.content.lib.utexas.edu:2048/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t54.e5923) on Sept. 22, 2004.
Wikipedia. (2004). Algernon Swinburne (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algernon_Swinburne). Retreived on Sept. 22, 2004.
Sabazius. (1995). (Algernon Charles) Swinburne (http://www.hermetic.com/sabazius/swinburne.htm). Retreived from The Invisible Basilica on Sept. 22, 2004.

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