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Swinburne

(Revision as of 17:24, 16 Jan 2005)

Categories: The Gnostic Saints

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. Swinburne served as inspiration for many future poets, not the least of which was Aleister Crowley.


Table of contents
1 Overview
2 Crowley on Swinburne
3 Notable poems
4 Works
5 Further Reading
6 External link
7 References

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 a great inspiration to English Romantics of the 19th century. British students at Oxford and Cambridge gathered in the university quadrangles to chant passages from Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866). His book length essay on William Blake was instrumental in bringing the earlier poet to critical attention.

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.

Crowley on Swinburne

Aleister Crowley canonized Swinburne as a saint of the Gnostic Catholic Church.

Swinburne had been an enormous influence on Crowley's poetic sensibilities; Crowley "could not doubt, after the first acquaintance that he was a classic." (Confessions, p. 114)

As Crowley wrote in an early draft of his General Principles of Astrology, "Swinburne had been tabooed, reformed and nullified. Victorianism was convinced that he was a negligible quantity, but the younger generation knew him by heart, and was already acting on his revolutionary conceptions." In another section, Crowley recounted:
A much stronger case is Swinburne, who was literally saturated with antiquity. He wrote almost entirely of classical mythology or legend; he imitated the actual meters used by Greek poets or French, using such forgotten forms as the ballade and the chaunt royale. He even wrote poems in Greek, Latin and French, so admirably formed that they might have been written three thousand years before. He then spent twenty years with Mary Queen of Scots and the Elizabethans. He wrote numerous ballads in the style of different authors of almost forgotten periods. Even his most modern work was suffused with the ancient spirit. (General Principles of Astrology, p. 575)

In Crowley's Rites of Eleusis, a series of public pieces of ritual theater, he used many of Swinburne's poems, including "Ilicet," "Hertha," "The Garden of Proserpine," and several choruses from Atalanta in Calydon.

Notable poems

Works

Further Reading

A modern study of his religious attitudes:

External link

References


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