Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was an
English poet, controversial in his own day. He invented the
roundel form, wrote some novels,
and contributed to the famous
Eleventh
Edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Biography
Swinburne
was born at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place
, London, on 5 April 1837. He was the eldest
of six children born to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry
Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the
3rd Earl of
Ashburnham.
He grew up at East Dene in Bonchurch on the
Isle of
Wight
and attended Eton college
1849-53, where he first started writing poetry, and
then Balliol College,
Oxford
1856-60 with a brief hiatus when he was rusticated from the university in
1859, returning in May 1860.
He spent
summer holidays at Capheaton
Hall
in Northumberland
, the house of his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne
(1762-1860) who had a famous library and was President of the
Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle upon
Tyne
. Swinburne considered Northumberland to be his
native county, an emotion memorably reflected in poems like the
intensely patriotic 'Northumberland', 'Grace Darling
' and others. He enjoyed riding his pony
across the moors (he was a daring horseman) 'through honeyed
leagues of the northland border'. He never called it the Scottish
border.
In the
years 1857-60, Swinburne became one of Lady Pauline Trevelyan's
intellectual circle at Wallington Hall
and after his grandfather's death in 1860, would
stay with William Bell Scott in
Newcastle. In December 1862, Swinburne accompanied Bell
Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on a trip to
Tynemouth
. Scott writes in his memoirs that as they
walked by the sea, Swinburne declaimed the as yet unpublished 'Hymn
to Proserpine' and 'Laus Veneris' in his strange intonation, while
the waves 'were running the whole length of the long level sands
towards Cullercoats
and sounding like far-off
acclamations'.
At university Swinburne associated with the
Pre-Raphaelites and counted among his best
friends Dante Gabriel Rossetti. After leaving college he lived in
London and started an active writing career, where Rossetti was
delighted with his 'little (a reference to Swinburne's diminutive
height) Northumbrian friend'.
His poetic works include:
Atalanta in Calydon (1865),
Poems and Ballads I (1866),
Songs before Sunrise (1871),
Poems and Ballads II, (1878)
Tristram of Lyonesse (1882),
Poems and Ballads III (1889), and the novel
Lesbia
Brandon (published posthumously).
Poems and Ballads I 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
medieval 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
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, one of the MacDonald
sisters] 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.
Swinburne was an
alcoholic and
algolagniac, and a highly excitable character.
His health suffered as a result, and in 1879 at the age of 42 he
had a mental and physical breakdown and was taken into care by his
friend
Theodore Watts, who looked
after him for the rest of his life at No.
2 The Pines, Putney
.
Thereafter he lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a
figure of social respectability.
He died in South West
London
, on 10 April 1909 at the age of 72 and was buried
at St.
Boniface Church, Bonchurch
on the Isle of Wight.
Criticism
Swinburne is considered a
decadent poet, although he perhaps
professed to more vice than he actually indulged in, a fact which
Oscar Wilde famously and acerbically
commented upon, stating that Swinburne was "a braggart in matters
of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow
citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the
slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer."
His mastery of
vocabulary,
rhyme and
metre is
impressive, although he has also been criticized for his florid
style and word choices that only fit the rhyme scheme rather than
contributing to the meaning of the piece. He is the virtual star of
the third volume of
George
Saintsbury's famous
History of English Prosody, and
A. E.
Housman, a more measured and even
somewhat hostile critic, devoted paragraphs of praise to his
rhyming ability.
Swinburne's work was once quite popular
among undergraduates at Oxford
and Cambridge
, though today it has gone out of fashion.
This is at least somewhat contextual, as it tends to mirror the
popular and academic consensus regarding his work, although his
Poems and Ballads, First Series and his
Atalanta in
Calydon have never been out of critical favor.
It was Swinburne's misfortune that the two works, published when he
was nearly 30, soon established him as England's premier poet, the
successor to
Alfred Lord
Tennyson and
Robert Browning.
This was a position he held in the popular mind until his death,
but sophisticated critics like A. E. Housman felt, rightly or
wrongly, that the job of being one of England's very greatest poets
was beyond him.
After the first
Poems and Ballads, Swinburne's later
poetry is devoted more to philosophy and politics (notably, in
favour of the unification of Italy, particularly in the volume
Songs before Sunrise). He does
not stop writing love poetry entirely (including his great
epic-length poem,
Tristram of Lyonesse), but the content
is much less shocking. His versification, and especially his
rhyming technique, remain in top form to the end.
T. S.
Eliot read Swinburne's essays on the
Shakespearean and Jonsonian dramatists in
The Contemporaries of
Shakespeare and
The Age of Shakespeare and
Swinburne's books on Shakespeare and Jonson. Writing on Swinburne
in 'The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism', Eliot found
that as a poet writing notes on poets, he had mastered his
material, writing "'he is more reliable to them than
Hazlitt,
Coleridge, or
Lamb: and his perception of relative
values is almost always correct." However, Eliot disliked
Swinburne's prose. About this he wrote "the tumultuous outcry of
adjectives, the headstrong rush of undisciplined sentences, are the
index to the impatience and perhaps laziness of a disorderly
mind."
Publications
- Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Century of Roundels, London: Chatto and Windus
1883
- The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed.
Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise. London: William Heinemann,
1926
Further reading
A modern study of his religious attitudes:
References
- Deaths
England and Wales 1837-1983
- A. C. Swinburne: Biography
External links
(scanned books original editions color
illustrated)
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