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Algernon Charles Swinburne |
Algernon Charles Swinburne (5 April 1837 – 10 April 1909)
Swinburne was a Victorian era English poet. His poetry was highly controversial in its day, much of it containing recurring themes of sadomasochism, death-wish, lesbianism and irreligion. Swinburne was the eldest of six children born to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Hamilton. He grew up 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. At university he associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and counted among his best friends Dante Gabriel Rossetti. After university he lived in London and started an active writing career. Swinburne was an alcoholic and algolagnic, 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. Thereafter he lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability. He died at the age of 72 and was buried at Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight. 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.
Poem: A Match (To a Butterfly)
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