Algernon Swinburne

File:Swinburne.jpg

Algernon Swinburne, Portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Algernon Charles Swinburne (April 5, 1837 – April 10, 1909) was a Victorian era English poet. He was one of the foudning members of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, a movement among painters and poets to return the arts to an idealized medieval standards, before the detrimental influence of intellecutalism and the Renaissance. In this respect, Swinburne and his associates were quite similar, in their sentiments, to the Romantic movement of a generation prior, which had also denounced the rise of the new and longed for the ways of the old.

Although, as a Pre-Raphaelite, he professed to be interested solely in the medieval and ancient classics, Swinburne was primarily influenced by the Elizabethan poets and playwrights such as Shakespeare and Jonson. Like Shakespeare, Swinburne is a master of music; in his own time and in contemporary times Swinburne is acknowledged as one of the most gifted masters of poetic form. His genius for rhyme, meter, and sound was unparalleled even by Tennyson. Unfortunately, Swinburne's poetry suffers much too much from a tendency to relish in the music of words without paying any attention at all to their meaning, and his reputation has greatly suffered because of this fault.

Nevertheless, Swinburne was one of the most gifted poets of his generation and, it is also worth noting, one of its most iconoclastic. In an age notorious for its moral decadence, Swinburne is—at least in terms of reputation—an unequalled deviant. Swinburne relished in shocking his audience, and many of his more blasphemous and explicit poems were most likely written specifically for that intent. Nonetheless, it is important not to neglect the reputation for controversy that Swinburne (or "Swineborn" as some of his most ferocious critics would call him) attracted to himself. In old age Swinburne would tone down his attacks on organized religion and sexual morality, ultimately becoming, like Wordsworth, something of a rebel-turned-conservative. His opinions, like his poems, are representative of the Victorian era in which he lived—a time of rapid social change, when moral standards were shifting wildly—and, for all his faults, Swinburne is one of the finest poets his era produced.

Life and Work

Swinburne was born in Grosvenor Palace, London, but spent most of his childhood on the Isle of Wight. His family had been a member of the aristocracy for generations—his father was an admiral of the Royal Navy and his maternal grandfather was an earl—and Swinburne was raised in an environment of extreme wealth and luxury. He was particularly close to his paternal grandfather, who had been a nobleman of the French aristocracy before the French Revolution, and who taught the boy to speak French and Italian.

As soon as he was of age, young Swinburne was sent to Oxford, where he would make many friends who would become the most influential members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Professor Benjamin Jowett. Swinburne made a particularly stong impression on Rossetti who, when he met Swinburne, was in the midst of painting a series of murals celebrating King Arthur, a figure who would later factor prominently in Pre-Raphaelite poetry and art.

Swinburne made a strong impression on colleagues at Oxford. Although he was a small man—he stood barely over five feet tall—Swinburne was known for his imposing presence and powerful voice, and rapidly gained a reputation as a rather unpredictable and wild character on campus. He was known to galavant about Oxford at night, decanting poems at the top of his lungs and shouting out blasphemies at God. Swinburne's rowdy behavior and outspoken, heretical views swiftly landed him in trouble with the managing authorities of the university and&despite Jowett's insistence that he tone down his antics—within two years Swinburne found himself out of college without a degree. Fortunately his father had given him an allowance substantial enough to live on, and Swinburne commenced taking up the literary life in earnest, moving in with his friend and fellow-poet Rossetti. During these youthful years Swinburne continued with his uproarious antics—Swinburne gained a reputation as a formidable drunkard, and in time would find himself accused of virtually every sin and heresy under the sun.

Swinburne relished in his own infamy, responding to accusations of sexual deviance and indecency by propagating even more outrageous rumors about himself, going so as to suggest that he might have participated in torture and cannibalism. Most of the tales of Swinburne's transgressions are regarded as being nothing but gossip and fantasies; Oscar Wilde, a close contemporary, went so far as to suggest that Swinburne was nothing but a poseur, and the idea that Swinburne may have led a relatively tame and ordinary life (aside from his constant drinking) has continued to gain wider acceptance. Much like Lord Byron, the controversy Swinburne generated in his own time has caused a distraction for generations of subsequent readers, who have spent endless hours middling over the details of his personal life rather than assessing his poetry.

With his poetry in mind, it is important to recall that all the while Swinburne was causing a scene in public life he was also busy developing his latent talents as a writer of verse. In 1865, only a few years after leavin Oxford, he published his first major work, Atalanta in Calydon, a long dramatic poem meant to reproduce the tone and lyricism of ancient Greek drama in the English language. The poem rocketed Swinburne to instant stardom in the London literary community, and it is still considered by many of Swinburne's critics to be his finest work.

The story, modeled after Greek mythology, centers on Meleager, prince of Calydon, and Atalanta, a beautiful woman who will ultimately and unwittingly doom them both. Meleager's father, King Oeneus, earned the wrath of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, after he sacrificed to every god but her on the eve of a major battle. Oeneus succeeded in winning the battle nonetheless, and in revenge Artemis summoned a monstrous boar to attack the kingdom and kill everyone in it. Then, as Swinburne himself explains in the argument to the poem:

Then were all the chief men of Greece gathered together, and

among them Atalanta daughter of Iasius the Arcadian, a virgin, for whose sake Artemis let slay the boar, seeing she favoured the maiden greatly; and Meleager having despatched it gave the spoil thereof to Atalanta, as one beyond measure enamoured of her; but the brethren of Althaea his mother, Toxeus and Plexippus, with such others as misliked that she only should bear off the praise whereas many had borne the labour, laid wait for her to take away her spoil; but Meleager fought against them and slew them: whom when Althaea their sister beheld and knew to be slain of her son, she waxed for wrath and sorrow like as one mad, and taking the brand whereby the measure of her son's life was meted to him, she cast it upon a fire; and with the wasting thereof his life likewise wasted away, that being brought back to his father's house he died in a brief space, and his mother also endured not long after for very sorrow; and this was his end, and the end of that hunting.

The melodramatic nature of the poem, with its themes of lost love and self-sacrifice, resonated powerfully with the largely sentimental audience of Victorians who had grown up reading Romantic literature. The poem's adoption of Greek mythology and its imitation of Greek poetic style also won favor with a reading public that had become fascinated with the ancient world.

Swinburne was born in London, and raised on the Isle of Wight, and at Capheaton Hall, near Wallington, Northumberland. He attended Eton college and then Balliol College, Oxford but had the rare distinction (like Oscar Wilde) of being rusticated from the university in 1859. He was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and counted among his best friends Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

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 early and still admired poems evoke the Victorian fascination with the Middle Ages, and some of them are explicitly medieval in style, tone and construction, these representatives notably being "The Leper," "Laus Veneris," and "St Dorothy".

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 lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability.

His vocabulary, rhyme and metre arguably make him one of the best poets of the English language; but his poetry has been criticized as overly flowery and meaningless, choosing words to fit the rhyme rather than to contribute towards meaning.

Works include: Atalanta in Calydon, Tristram of Lyonesse, Poems and Ballads (series I, II and III — these contain most of his more controversial works), Songs Before Sunrise, Lesbia Brandon (novel published posthumously).

He also wrote poems in favour of the unification of Italy, particularly in the volume Songs before Sunrise. His work was very popular among undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge, though today it has largely gone out of fashion. This, at least, is the current popular and even the academic view of the decline of Swinburne's reputation, but it contains some distortion.

In fact Swinburne's 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.

Swinburne may have felt this way himself. He was a highly intelligent man and in later life a much-respected critic, and he himself believed that the older a man was, the more cynical and less trustworthy he became. Swinburne may have been one of the first people not to trust anyone over thirty. This of course created problems for him after he himself passed that age.

After the first Poems and Ballads, Swinburne's later poetry is devoted more to politics and philosophy. He does not utterly stop writing love poetry, but he is far less shocking. His versification, and especially his rhyming technique, remain masterful to the end. He is the virtual star of the third volume of George Saintsbury's famous History of English Prosody, and Housman, a more measured and even somewhat hostile critic, devoted paragraphs of praise to his rhyming ability.

Further reading

A modern study of his religious attitudes:

• Swinburne and His Gods: the Roots and Growth of an Agnostic Poetry by Margot Kathleen Louis (ISBN 0773507159)

External links

• The Algernon Charles Swinburne Archive: A digital archive of the life and works of Algernon Charles Swinburne
• Works by Algernon Swinburne. Project Gutenberg

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