An Introduction to Algernon Charles Swinburne

John A. Walsh

Brief Biographical Sketch

Early Life

Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in London at 5 a.m. on April 5th 1837 to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta Swinburne. The eldest of six children, Swinburne was born into two old aristocratic families. His father was a younger son of Sir John Swinburne of Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, and his mother was the fourth daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham, of Ashburnham Place in Sussex.
Swinburne grew up in two homes: Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, about twenty miles inland from the North Sea, and East Dene, a large stone mansion and estate in the village of Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England. The environs, emotions, and experiences of these twin homes—in the extreme north and extreme south of the country—served to seed Swinburne's potent collection of symbolically charged physical places and spaces: the Scottish border, the sea and cliff-lined seascapes, the Channel, Sark, Athens, Italy. Likewise, Swinburne's emotions, enthusiasms, experiences, education and above all the voracious reading begun during his earlier years at Capheaton and East Dene became touchstones throughout his life and work.
In 1848, Swinburne was sent to live at Brooke Rectory, on the western side of the Isle of Wight, to be prepared for Eton by the Reverend Foster Fenwick. From 1849-53 Swinburne attended Eton and lived with his tutor, James Leigh Joynes, and Joynes' wife.
Upon leaving Eton, Swinburne was sent to Cambo, Northumberland to be prepared for Oxford by Reverend John Wilkinson.

Oxford

In 1856, Swinburne arrived at Oxford as a student in Balliol College. Swinburne established many influential and long-lasting relationships at Oxford, where he met the Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Michael Rossetti, all of whom would remain life-long friends and to each of whom, individually, Swinburne would dedicate a major work.
Swinburne developed other strong friendships while at Oxford, including a lasting friendship Benjamin Jowett, an Oxford Don, Master of Balliol College, theologian and classicist, perhaps most famous as a translator of Plato.
With his close friend, John Nichol, Swinburne was a member of an undergraduate group of intellectuals, writers, artists, thinkers. They called themselves the Old Mortality and published a short-lived journal Undergraduate Papers, which ran to three issues and in which Swinburne published essays on “The Early English Dramatists,” “Modern Hellenism” (a critique of Matthew Arnold's lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford), and “Church Imperialism.” He also published a parodic review of an invented drama The Monomaniac's Tragedy by an invented spasmodic poet Ernest Wheldrake. He published a canto of Queen Yseult, a narrative poem in rhymed tercets and an early example of Swinburne's recurring engagement with Arthurian legend.
Swinburne left Oxford in November 1859 without taking a degree and moved to London.

London

In London Swinburne engaged in an active social life. At social gatherings Swinburne would often recite from his prodigious memory his own poems and the works of others. He frequented parties hosted by Richard Monckton Milnes (later Lord Houghton). Milnes introduced Swinburne to many cultural figures, including Richard Francis Burton, adventurer, writer, translator, and diplomat. Burton and Swinburne shared a fondness for erotic literature and for brandy.
Swinburne also traveled frequently during this period, including visits to the Channel Islands, Italy (where he met his hero Walter Savage Landor), and France (where he met another hero, Victor Hugo).
In the 1870s Swinburne's health deteriorated as a result of his excessive drinking habits.

Putney

Through the intervention of his mother and close friend Theodore Watts (later Watts-Dunton), Swinburne was removed from his London rooms to live at The Pines in Putney with Watts-Dunton. There Swinburne lived out his days, writing prolifically and reading voraciously, under the watchful eye of his dear friend. As Rikky Rooksby writes in his biography of Swinburne, “The role of Watts-Dunton in Swinburne's life was a mixed blessing”: For much of their time at The Pines, Swinburne was happy, healthy and productive. Watts-Dunton banished some of the loneliness from Swinburne's existence as he banished the spectre of an early death through alcoholism.… It is also true that he banished some of Swinburne's friends and sources of inspiration. (2) Whatever the influence of Watts-Dunton, the decline in the quality of Swinburne's poetry is not markedly different from the decline seen in the work of many other poets who continue to a similar age as Swinburne. In any case, it is clear Swinburne produced some remarkable work after taking up residence at The Pines. Parts of Songs of the Springtides, Studies in Song, and other later collections rank among Swinburne's best work. The long narrative Tristram of Lyonesse is generally considered to be among Swinburne's greatest works and among the great long English poems of the nineteenth century.
Swinburne continued writing and publishing into the twentieth century. Though he grew nearly deaf, which curtailed his social activities, Swinburne remained physically active until the end, settling into a daily routine of walks along Wimbledon Commons. Having arrived in Wimbledon, Swinburne would stop at a bookseller's shop for newspapers and at the Rose and Crown pub for a single bottle of Bass Ale before his return journey to The Pines. Swinburne's final years are recounted in a charming book, The Home Life of Swinburne, by Clara Watts-Dunton, who married Theodore Watts-Dunton in 1905.
Algernon Charles Swinburne died on April 10th, 1909 of complications from pneumonia.
For more details on Swinburne's life, consult the best and most recent of Swinburne biographies, Rikky Rooksby's excellent A. C. Swinburne: A Poet's Life (Scolar Press, 1997).

Literary Career

1860s: Early Fame

Swinburne entered the public literary scene with little notice in 1860 with the publication of two dramas in one volume, The Queen-Mother and Rosamond, dedicated to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Queen-Mother portrays the machinations of Catherine di Medici (the Queen Mother of the title) to persuade her son, King Charles IX of France, to order what would become known as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
In his 1970 volume Algernon Charles Swinburne in the Critical Heritage series, Clyde K. Hyder identifies two short unsigned notices, in the Spectator and the Athenaeum, of The Queen-Mother and Rosamond. Both reviews were negative. The reviewer in the Spectator wrote, We cannot say so much of the two dramas entitled, The Queen Mother and Rosamond. We have with some difficulty read through them
A more extended and very sympathetic review of the volume appears in John Bull April 6th 1861. The unsigned reviewer finds in Swinburne “signs of a rich fancy, and a powerful grasp of ideas,” “a very high poetic invention,” and “an artistic power of no common order.”
In 1865 Swinburne published two more works: Atalanta in Calydon, a lyrical drama modeled on Greek tragedy with blank verse dialogue and rhymed, lyrical choruses, and Chastelard, the first in Swinburne's trilogy of dramas on the subject of Mary Stuart. Atalanta received a more positive reception than Swinburne's first volume. A lengthy, unsigned review in the Saturday Review observed: Atalanta in Calydon is an attempt to reproduce a Greek tragedy in its ideas as well as its form, to some extent even in its metres—an attempt necessarily chargeable with faults and weaknesses, yet still one of the most brilliant that our literature contains. (540)
In an 1866 letter to Charles Eliot Norton, John Ruskin wrote: Have your read Swinburne's Atalanta—the grandest thing ever yet done by a youth—though he is a Demoniac youth—whether ever he will be clothed and his right mind—heaven only knows. His foam at the mouth is fine, meantime. (96-97)

Poems and Ballads, First Series

The publication in 1866 of Poems and Ballads was the most significant event in the literary career of Algernon Charles Swinburne, and it was one of the more significant and influential events in nineteenth-century literature and Victorian culture. An early biography of Swinburne by Edmund Gosse captures the intensity and impact of Swinburne's explosion onto the cultural and literary scene. Gosse was sixteen when Poems and Ballads was published in July 1866 and benefits from being closer to the action than the modern twenty-first-century reader: Algernon Swinburne in the winter of 1866 was simply the young man of almost fabulous genius, who had produced a sensation among lovers of poetry such as had not been approached since the youth of Tennyson. As an eminent critic, then an undergraduate at Oxford, has said, “It simply swept us off our legs with rapture.” At Cambridge the young men joined hands and marched along shouting Dolores or A song in time of Revolution. The volume was mixed up with other fire-crackers in the preparation for the Fifth of November. It stood for passion and flame and revolt, it raced beside the swiftest of its admirers and easily beat them. As Mr. [George] Saintsbury, himself an ardent youth in those days, outside any circle of personal relations with the poet, has recorded, “all the metaphors and similes of water, light, wind, fire, all the modes of motion” seemed to inspire and animate this wonderful poetry, which took the whole lettered youth of England by storm with its audacity and melody. (160-161) Published as his first collection when Swinburne was twenty-nine, Poems and Ballads was a large collection, sixty-two poems representing Swinburne's best work to that point. The volume is famous for its fascination with the femme fatale and representations of taboo or unconventional sexuality, particularly evident in poems such as Dolores, Faustine, Laus Veneris, and Anactoria.
The emphasis critics and literary historians have placed upon the representations of sexuality in Poems and Ballads has obscured the diversity of not only the 1866 volume but of Swinburne's entire oeuvre. Jerome McGann has argued, [S]o shocking was the advent of this epochal book that it would come to obscure the range of Swinburne’s work—a range so extensive that one can sometimes scarcely imagine how it came to be thought narrow or precious (207). This extensive range is evident within Swinburne's first collection, with its lyrics, ballads, dramatic monologues (Laus Veneris, Itylus, Anactoria, Hymn to Proserpine), other dramatic forms (Phaedra,, The Masque of Queen Bersabe), ekphrastic works (A Christmas Carol, Before the Mirror, Hermaphroditus), classical forms (Hendecasyllabics, Sapphics) poems with biblical, classical, medieval, and contemporary settings. Poems and Ballads is an expansive tour de force displaying Swinburne's virtuosic mastery of genres and verse forms, diverse themes and settings, and compelling characters.

1870s: Political Verse

In the 1870s Swinburne's verse shifted focus to politics, patriotism, republicanism, condemnations of tyranny, and celebrations of liberty. These were not new themes for Swinburne, but the emphasis and focus on these themes was a marked contrast to the previous collection Poems and Ballads. Songs Before Sunrise appeared in 1871. The volume was dedicated to Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, a major figure in the nineteenth-century unification of Italy. Many of the poems are explicitly topical, addressing specific events and figures in the Italian struggle, e.g., The Halt before Rome, Mentana: First Anniversary, Blessed among Women, Ode on the Insurrection in Candia, and others. Swinburne often chose classical, biblical, or theological motifs to amplify his explorations of contemporary issues and events. Blessed among Women, for instance, adopts Marian language and epithets in praise of Signora Adelaide Bono Cairoli, mother of five brothers, all of whom fought and four of whom died in the Italian struggle. And Super Flumina Babylonis, borrows its title from Psalm 136 in the Vulgate and evokes the Babylonian captivity.
Songs of Two Nations was a slim volume that included two long poems and a sonnet sequence, all previously published elsewhere before being collected into this volume. A Song of Italy, dedicated to Mazzini; Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic, dedicated to Victor Hugo; and Dirae, a sonnet sequence of vituperative attacks against those Swinburne believed to be enemies of liberty and republicanism.
Swinburne's Erechtheus appeared in 1876 and represents a return to the form of Greek tragedy first attempted with Atalanta in Calydon. Erechtheus may be read as the culmination of Swinburne's republican poetry. Erechtheus eschews the explicit topicality of the collections Songs Before Sunrise and Songs of Two Nations and instead provides a sustained classical and mythological framework to support Swinburne's themes of Republicanism, liberty, patriotism and sacrifice.
Swinburne closes the 1870s with Poems and Ballads, Second Series, published in 1878, a volume that departs from the preoccupation with politics that dominated Swinburne's poetry throughout most of the decade. The influence of French literature is particularly strong in this volume, which includes Swinburne famous elegy for Baudelaire (Ave Atque Vale), as well as elegies for Gautier, written in English (Memorial Verses on the Death of Théophile Gautier), French (Théophile Gautier), and Latin (In Obitum Theophili Poetae) and verses to Villon, Hugo, and Théodore de Banville. Poems and Ballads, Second Series also includes many of Swinburne's translations from Villon.

1880s: Transition & Maturity

Upon settling in with Watts-Dunton at The Pines, Swinburne entered an incredibly productive period. In 1880 he published four volumes: three smaller volumes of poetry (Songs Before Sunrise, Studies in Song, and The Heptalogia, a collection of parodies—of Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne himself, and others) and a critical monograph, A Study of Shakespeare. In 1881 he published Mary Stuart, the final work in his trilogy, begun in 1865 with Chastelard, on the ill-fated queen. All this was followed in 1882 by Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems. Tristram of Lyonesse—a Romantic epic in heroic couplets—is unquestionably one of Swinburne's major works and one of the great long poems of the nineteenth century. Swinburne had long been fascinated by the story of Tristan and Iseult and wrote about the legend in his very early work Queen Yseult, which appeared, while Swinburne was at Oxford, in the short-lived journal Undergraduate Papers.
Following on the heels of this majestic, erotic epic, Swinburne published in 1853 A Century of Roundels, a volume that exhaustively explores a tiny form, the Roundel. Swinburne is credited with the invention of this form, modeled on French fixed forms, the rondeau and rondel. Swinburne's variation is a nine-line poem in three stanzas (abaR bab abaR, with the R designating a refrain that consists of the first word or phrase of the poem). A Century of Roundels, dedicated to Christina Rossetti, includes about midway through the volume a meta-poem providing commentary on the form:
The Roundel
A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere, With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought, That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear A roundel is wrought.
Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught— Love, laughter, or mourning—remembrance of rapture or fear— That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.
As a bird's quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught, So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear, A roundel is wrought.
Swinburne was also a prolific composer of sonnets (see, for instance, Hermaphroditus, Love and Sleep, A Death on Easter Day, On Lamb's Specimens of Dramatic Poets, On the Russian Persecution of the Jews, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650), A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning). Swinburne was frequently charged by critics with excessive verbosity and lack of concision. These comments on Thalassius, from an unsigned review of Songs of the Springtides in The Saturday Review, are typical: Surely it is not an unfair or captious criticism which sees in Thalassius a vast excess of sound over sense, a prodigality of words with do not so much express as conceal the poet's meaning. (699) In the face of such charges, it is worth noting that Swinburne had mastered highly concentrated and compact forms such as the sonnet and the roundel.
In 1884 Swinburne published A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems, which included poems of landscapes and seascapes, political verse, and of course more elegies. Poems and Ballads, Third Series, published in 1889, included To a Seamew, Pan and Thalassius, Neap-Tide, elegies for Sir Henry Taylor and John William Inchbold, and a number of border ballads originally intended for Lesbia Brandon, Swinburne's unfinished novel.

1890s and 1900s: Final Achievements

In the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, before his death in 1909, Swinburne published two more collections of poems, Astrophel and Other Poems (1894) and A Channel Passage and Other Poems (1904), and another Arthurian epic, The Tale of Balen (1896). Swinburne wrote some splendid poetry in his later years. A fine example is A Nympholept, a submlime encounter with the nature god Pan:
The naked noon is upon me: the fierce dumb spell, The fearful charm of the strong sun's imminent might, Unmerciful, steadfast, deeper than seas that swell, Pervades, invades, appals me with loveless light, With harsher awe than breathes in the breath of night. Have mercy, God who art all! For I know thee well, How sharp is thine eye to lighten, thine hand to smite.
(ll. 85-91)
As Swinburne aged and his friends, peers, and heroes passed away in increasing numbers, Swinburne had even more opportunities in these late volumes to add to his prolific output of elegies. The two late collections include elegies to Swinburne's close friend Richard Burton, Robert Browning, William Bell Scott, and Christina Rossetti.

Drama, Prose Fiction, and Criticism

This introduction has focused on Swinburne's poetry. Swinburne's six-volume collected Poems, published in 1904, was followed in 1905 the five-volume Tragedies of Algernon Charles Swinburne. The dramas include: Queen Mother; Rosamond; the Mary Stuart trilogy: Chastelard, Bothwell, and Mary Stuart; Locrine; The Sisters; Marino Faliero; and Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards. The fragmentary Duke of Gandia was published later in 1908. With the exception of The Sisters, a blank-verse drama with a contemporary nineteenth-century setting, these are all tragedies on historical or legendary figures and bear the strong influence of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama to which Swinburne was so devoted. Swinburne's dramas have generally been considered unsuccessful. They are long and dense and complex. Swinburne had an intimate and comprehensive knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. In fact, Swinburne, perhaps the most widely read of English poets, considered Charles Lamb's selections from Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists to be among the two most influential books in the vast canon of literature that Swinburne knew so intimately. As Gosse reports in his Life, while looking over Gosse's bookshelves, Swinburne selected a copy of Lamb's Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets, and, turning to Gosse, said, That book taught me more than any other in the world—that and the Bible. Writing in his autobiography, Henry Adams comments at length on Swinburne and on his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediaeval, and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo (140). Thus a full appreciation and understanding of Swinburne's dramas (and other works) requires a familiarity with the literary past and the many literary traditions within which Swinburne worked. It would have been difficult for many nineteenth-century readers to match Swinburne's literary knowledge, and it is more difficult for modern readers who are often never exposed to many of the authors and works that held such sway over Swinburne.
Swinburne was also a prolific and influential critic. Swinburne wrote shorter essays on Hugo, Byron, Shelley, Arnold, D. G. Rossetti, Morris, Coleridge, John Ford, Congreve, Collins, Wordsworth, Lamb, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Emily Brontë, Chaucer, Spenser, Charles Reade, Walter Scott, Benjamin Jowett, John Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Wilkie Collins, Whitman, and others. He also wrote essays on art that influenced figures such as Pater and Wilde. Swinburne's shorter essays were gathered in the collections Essays and Studies (1875), Miscellanies (1886), and Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894). He also wrote several book-length critical works: William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868), George Chapman: A Critical Essay (1875), A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877), A Study of Ben Jonson (1889), A Study of Shakespeare (1880), and A Study of Victor Hugo (1886).
Matthew Arnold found Swinburne to be a sensitive and insightful critic of Arnold's own works. After reading Swinburne's essay Mr. Arnold's New Poems, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review 8, (Oct. 1867), Arnold wrote in a letter to Francis Turner Palgrave: Swinburne fairly took my breath away. I must say the general public praise me in the dubious style in which old Wordsworth used to praise Bernard Barton, James Montgomery, and suchlike; and the writers of poetry, on the other hand—Browning, Swinburne, Lytton—praise me as the general public praises its favourites. This is a curious reversal of the usual order of things. Perhaps it is from an exaggerated estimate of my own unpopularity and obscurity as a poet, but my first impulse is to be astonished at Swinburne's praising me, and to think it an act of generosity. Also he picks passages which I myself should have picked, and which I have not seen other people pick.
Twentieth-century poet and critic T. S. Eliot opens his essay Swinburne as Critic with an acknowledgement of the signficiance of Swinburne's criticism and Swinburne's mastery of his subjects: Three conclusions at least issue from the perusal of Swinburne's critical essays: Swinburne had mastered his material, was more inward with the Tudor-Stuart dramatists than any man of pure letters before or since; he is a more reliable guide to them than Hazlitt, Coleridge, or Lamb; and his perception of relative values is almost always correct. Against these merits we may oppose two objections: the style is the prose style of Swinburne, and the content is not, in an exact sense, criticism. The faults of style are, of course, personal; the tumultuous outcry of adjectives, the headstrong rush of undisciplined sentences, are the index to the impatience and perhaps laziness of a disorderly mind. But the style has one positive merit: it allows us to know that Swinburne was writing not to establish a critical reputation, not to instruct a docile public, but as a poet his notes upon poets whom he admired. And whatever our opinion of Swinburne's verse, the notes upon poets by a poet of Swinburne's dimensions must be read with attention and respect. (17)
Future editions of The Swinburne Project will incorporate texts of Swinburne's dramas and prose criticism.

Works Cited

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918. Arnold, Matthew. “To Francis Turner Palgrave.” 9 Oct. 1867. Letter V3P176D1 of The Letters of Matthew Arnold: A Digital Edition. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2006. Rev. of Atalanta in Calydon, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 6 May 1865: 540-42. Eliot, T.S. Swinburne as Critic. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1920. 17-23. Gosse, Edmund. The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne.. New York: Macmillan, 1917. McGann, Jerome. “Swinburne's Radical Artifice; Or, the Comedian as A. C.Modernism/Modernity  11.2 (2004):  205-218. Rev. of The Queen-Mother and Rosamond, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. The Spectator 12 Jan. 1861: 42. Rev. of The Queen-Mother and Rosamond, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. John Bull 6 Apr. 1861: 219. Rev. of The Queen-Mother and Rosamond, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. The Athenaeum 4 May 1861: 595. Rooksby, Rikky. A. C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life. Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1997. Ruskin, John. “To Charles Eliot Norton.” 28 Jan. 1866. Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton. Ed. Charles Eliot Norton. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905. 156-57. Rev. of Songs of the Springtides, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 29 May 1880: 698-99. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Mr. Arnold's New Poems. Fortnightly Review 1 Oct. 1867: 414-445.