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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.