Selected Verse

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was one of English poetry's truly distinctive stylists, a supreme technician, with an unbelievable mastery over sound (Edith Sitwell). He was one of the major poets of the Victorian era, and almost certainly the most provocative. His pagan sensualism and masochistic fantasies thrilled and outraged his readers, while the musical textures of his verse both delighted and unsettled. In this new anthology of his finest verse, Swinburne's most celebrated collection, the Poems and Ballads of 1866, is represented much more fully than in earlier selections, and ample extracts are given from his later masterpiece, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). Also included are generous passages from the best of Swinburne's five-act tragedies, which have not been reprinted for nearly a century. Above all, this book is designed to make Swinburne, once again, a poet to be read widely for pleasure. No one else has made such music in English', wrote Ezra Pound; The splendid lines mount up in one's memory and overwhelm any minute restrictions of one's praise'.

Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in London in 1837 to an aristocratic family. As an undergraduate in Oxford, he made the acquaintance of D. G. Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, all of whom would influence his work. Returning to London without having completed his degree, he continued to associate with many leading figures of the Aesthetic Movement. The dramatic poem Atalanta in Calydon (1865) established his literary reputation, and he followed this success with a collection, Poems and Ballads (1866), which made him the most controversial English poet of the day. Many other volumes followed, including Songs Before Sunrise (1871), two more series of Poems and Ballads (1878 and 1889), the Arthurian epic Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), and several plays. Swinburne was also an important critic of modern and early-modern literature. During his two decades in London (1860-1879), his bohemian lifestyle was infamous, and the period was marred by ill-health and alcoholism. In 1879 his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton brought him to his own home in Putney, where he could be looked after. Here Swinburne remained, still writing, until his death in 1909.