Swinburne, Algernon Charles 1837-1909
English poet and critic

Born in London, he was educated partly in France and in England at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, but left without taking a degree. He travelled on the Continent, where he came under the spell of Victor Hugo, visited Walter Savage Landor in Florence (1864), and on his return became associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. After a breakdown due to heavy drinking and other excesses, he submitted to the care of his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton, in whose house he continued to live in semi-seclusion for the rest of his life. His first success was with Atalanta in Calydon (1865), a drama in the Greek form but modern in its spirit of revolt against religious acquiescence in the will of Heaven. However, it was the first of the series of Poems and Ballads (1866) which took the public by storm, although the uninhibited tone of certain passages affronted English puritanism. The second and third series (1878, 1889) were less successful. Meanwhile he found scope for his detestation of kings and priests in the struggle for Italian liberty. Songs before Sunrise (1871) best expresses his fervent republicanism. A trilogy on Mary, Queen of Scots was completed in 1881, and the following year Tristram of Lyonesse, an Arthurian romance in rhymed couplets, achieved a real success. Intense and passionate, it must be considered among the best of Victorian dealings with the medieval cycle. His novel Love's Cross Currents (1877), published under the pseudonym Mrs H Manners, is a curiosity, but his critical works, above all his work on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, are stimulating. His Essays and Studies (1875) and Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894) are his chief contribution to criticism.

Bibliography: G Lafourcade, Algernon Swinburne (1932)