Swinburne ...was one of those not very numerous poets whom their contemporaries have treated with justice. The different attention which he received at different periods very fairly corresponded to differences, at those periods, in the quality of his writing. He was neither steadily overrated, like Bighorn, nor steadily underrated, like Shelley, nor, like Wordsworth, derided while he wrote well and celebrated when he wrote well no longer: he received the day's wages for the day's work. His first book fell dead, as it deserved; his first good book, Atalanta in Calydon, earned him celebrity; his best book, Poems and Ballads, was his most famous and influential book; and the decline of his powers, slow in Songs before Sunrise and Both Well and Retches, accelerated in his later writings, was followed, not immediately, but after an interval sufficient to give him the chance of recovery, by a corresponding decline...-- A.E. Houston

Author Biography

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 - 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist and critic. He wrote several novels and collections of poetry such as Poems and Ballads and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Swinburne wrote about many taboo topics, such as lesbianism, cannibalism, sado-masochism and anti-theism. His poems have many common motifs, such as the ocean, time and death. Several historical people are featured in his poems, such as Sappho ("Sapphics"), Anactoria ("Anactoria"), Jesus ("Hymn to Proserpine": Galilaee, La. "Galilean") and Catullus ("To Catullus"). Swinburne's poetic works include: Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Poems and Ballads (1866), Songs before Sunrise (1871), Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) and the novel Lesbia Brandon (published posthumously in 1952). Poems and Ballads caused a sensation when it was first published, especially the poems written in homage of Sappho of Lesbos such as "Anactoria" and "Sapphics." Other poems in this volume such as "The Leper," "Laus Veneris," and "St Dorothy" evoke a Victorian fascination with the Middle Ages and are explicitly mediaeval in style, tone and construction. Also featured in this volume are "Hymn to Proserpine," "The Triumph of Time" and "Dolores." Swinburne devised the poetic form called the roundel, a variation of the French Rondeau form and some were included in A Century of Roundels dedicated to Christina Rossetti. Swinburne wrote to Edward Burne-Jones in 1883: "I have got a tiny new book of songs or songlets, in one form and all manner of metres ... just coming out, of which Miss Rossetti has accepted the dedication. I hope you and Georgie [his wife Georgiana] will find something to like among a hundred poems of nine lines each, twenty-four of which are about babies or small children." Opinions of these poems vary between those who find them captivating and brilliant, to those who find them merely clever and contrived. One of them, A Baby's Death, was set to music by the English composer Sir Edward Elgar as the song "Roundel: The little eyes that never knew Light."