Algernon Charles Swinburne (5 April 1837 – 10 April 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels and collections of poetry such as Poems and Ballads, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (5 April 1837 – 10 April 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels and collections of poetry such as Poems and Ballads, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Swinburne wrote practically many taboo topics, such as lesbianism, cannibalism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism. His poems have many common motifs, such as the ocean, time, and death. Several historical people are featured in his poems, such as Sappho (“Sapphics”), Anactoria (“Anactoria”), and Catullus (“To Catullus”).
Swinburne was born at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, on 5 April 1837. He was the eldest of six children born to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry Swinburne (1797–1877) and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham, a wealthy Northumbrian family. He grew in the works at East Dene in Bonchurch upon the Isle of Wight. The Swinburnes next had a London house at Whitehall Gardens, Westminster.
As a child, Swinburne was “nervous” and “frail,” but “was also on fire with excited energy and fearlessness to the narrowing of swine reckless.”
Swinburne attended Eton College (1849–53), where he started writing poetry. At Eton, he won first prizes in French and Italian. He attended Balliol College, Oxford (1856–60) with a brief hiatus as soon as he was rusticated from the university circles in 1859 for having publicly supported the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini. He returned in May 1860, though he never customary a degree.
Swinburne spent summer holidays at Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, the house of his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet (1762–1860), who had a well-known library and was president of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle on Tyne. Swinburne considered Northumberland to be his original county, an emotion reflected in poems behind the terribly patriotic “Northumberland”, “Grace Darling” and others. He enjoyed riding his pony across the moors, he was a carefree horseman, “through honeyed leagues of the northland border”, as he called the Scottish affix in his Recollections.
In the get older 1857–60, Swinburne became a fanatic of Lady Trevelyan’s intellectual circle at Wallington Hall.
After his grandfather’s death in 1860 he stayed later William Bell Scott in Newcastle. In 1861, Swinburne visited Menton upon the French Riviera, staying at the Villa Laurenti to recover from the excessive use of alcohol. From Menton, Swinburne travelled to Italy, where he journeyed extensively. In December 1862, Swinburne accompanied Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on a vacation to Tynemouth. Scott writes in his memoirs that, as they walked by the sea, Swinburne declaimed the as still unpublished “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Laus Veneris” in his lilting intonation, while the waves “were organization the cumulative length of the long level sands towards Cullercoats and sounding like far acclamations”.
At Oxford, Swinburne met several Pre-Raphaelites, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He along with met William Morris. After rejection college, he lived in London and started an responsive writing career, where Rossetti was delighted past his “little Northumbrian friend”, probably a mention to Swinburne’s diminutive height—he was just five-foot-four.
Swinburne was an alcoholic and algolagniac and terribly excitable. He liked to be flogged. His health suffered, and in 1879 at the age of 42, he was taken into care by his friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton, who looked after him for the burning of his computer graphics at The Pines, 11 Putney Hill, Putney. Watts-Dunton took him to the at a loose end town of Dunwich, on the Suffolk coast, on several occasions in the 1870s.
In Watts-Dunton’s care Swinburne wandering his youngster rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability. It was said of Watts-Dunton that he saved the man and killed the poet. Swinburne died at the Pines on 10 April 1909, at the age of 72, and was buried at St. Boniface Church, Bonchurch upon the Isle of Wight.