Poetry:
Poems and Ballads, 1866
A Song of Italy, 1867
Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic, 1870
Songs Before Sunrise, 1871
Songs of Two Nations, 1875
Poems and Ballads: Second Series, 1878
Songs of the Springtides, 1880
The Heptalogia, 1880
Tristram of Lyonesse, and Other Poems, 1882
A Century of Roundels, 1883
A Midsummer Holiday, and Other Poems, 1884
Gathered Songs, 1887
Poems and Ballads: Third Series, 1889
Astrophel, and Other Poems, 1894
The Tale of Balen, 1896
A Channel Passage, and Other Poems, 1904
Posthumous Poems, 1917
Rondeaux Parisiens, 1917
Ballads of the English Border, 1925
Long Fiction:
Love’s Cross-Currents, 1901 (serialized as A Year’s Letters in 1877)
Lesbia Brandon, 1952
Drama:
The Queen-Mother, pb. 1860
Rosamond, pb. 1860
Atalanta in Calydon, pb. 1865
Chastelard, pb. 1865
Bothwell, pb. 1874
Erechtheus, pb. 1876
Mary Stuart, pb. 1881
Marino Faliero, pb. 1885
Locrine, pb. 1887
The Sisters, pb. 1892
Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards, pb. 1899
The Duke of Gandia, pb. 1908
Nonfiction:
Byron, 1866
Notes on Poems and Reviews, 1866
William Blake: A Critical Essay, 1868
Under the Microscope, 1872
George Chapman, 1875
Essays and Studies, 1875
A Note on Charlotte Brontë, 1877
A Study of Shakespeare, 1880
Miscellanies, 1886
A Study of Victor Hugo, 1886
A Study of Ben Jonson, 1889
Studies in Prose and Poetry, 1894
The Age of Shakespeare, 1908
Three Plays of Shakespeare, 1909
Shakespeare, 1909
Contemporaries of Shakespeare, 1919
Miscellaneous:
The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1925-1927 (20 volumes; reprinted 1968)
Algernon Charles Swinburne’s fame as a poet rests on several claims: his dexterity in manipulation of verse; his subject matter, which often glorified the life of the senses or argued for the necessity of social change; and certain oddities in his actual career. In all of these claims, the man can be seen at odds with his age and yet drawing strength from it.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Swinburne was descended from English nobility. His mother was the daughter of the earl of Ashburnham, and his father was Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne. Algernon Charles Swinburne enjoyed fully the advantages of his background. From his mother he acquired a literary taste, a love of the French and Italian languages and literatures, and a thorough knowledge of the Bible. He was also allowed to read such critical writers as Victor Hugo and W. S. Landor, both advocates of republicanism and both objects of Swinburne’s hero worship. From a grandfather in Northumberland Swinburne learned hatred of monarchy and disapproval of the hereditary privileges of the House of Lords.
Swinburne early discovered his poetic vocation. Acquaintance in childhood with William Wordsworth and Samuel Rogers confirmed his intent by the time he was fifteen. The next decade brought Swinburne the companionship and encouragement of some leading literary figures of the period, among them Alfred, Lord Tennyson, John Ruskin, and, among the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Swinburne’s youthful claims to attention led Burne-Jones to welcome him thus: “We have hitherto been three, and now there are four of us.” Swinburne modeled for some of Rossetti’s paintings and had the painter’s personal direction in his writings. His affiliation with the Pre-Raphaelite movement drew attention to his own work, which early struck his contemporaries as clever, audacious, and erudite. From the time Atalanta in Calydon and Chastelard were published in 1865, Swinburne’s place in the literary world was secure, and it remained so for about fifteen years.
Swinburne’s themes–glorification of the senses and the assertion of human dignity–are but two aspects of his central impatience with restraint; the only restraint that Swinburne ever welcomed was that imposed by rather elaborate and even archaic poetical forms. In Poems and Ballads he scandalized his times with outspoken endorsement of sensuality; in Songs Before Sunrise he stirred them deeply with apostrophes to the insurgent republicans of Italy. In these years he was also a prose propagandist for the Pre-Raphaelites and a defender of his own literary practices. Against a charge made by Saturday Review that with colors intense and violent he effected an “audacious counterfeiting of strong and noble passion by mad, intoxicated sensuality,” Swinburne protested against a literary age that “has room only for such as are content to write for children and girls.”
The revolt in Swinburne’s own life needed to be curbed, however. In 1879 Theodore Watts-Dunton took Swinburne from London to save him from the effects of acute alcoholic dysentery. Although the move to Putney and a simpler life restored Swinburne’s health, it took the essential fire from his writings. He relinquished the idea of political freedom and increasingly turned from poetry to literary criticism. He became capable, as the young Swinburne with his impassioned seriousness would not have been, of composing parodies on the work of such prominent Victorian poets as Tennyson, Rossetti, and himself. The prose of his last years is far removed from his Pre-Raphaelite struggles and contemporary politics; he took up his early enthusiasm for the drama of Elizabethan England, of which he wrote brilliantly.
Swinburne was described as a man more “elf-like than human.” He was just over five feet tall and thin; he had a massive head thatched with shaggy red hair. His bizarre appearance prevented his success in love and, it can be believed, underlay the heightened behavior that led to his removal from Eton and Oxford; he later refused a degree from the university that had ejected him. He welcomed the implications of Darwinism and rejected, on the other hand, Robert Browning’s optimism and Tennyson’s aspirations toward immortality. Here, too, he departed from contemporary canons of taste and created his own philosophy and forms.