Edited and introduced by Mark Scroggins
Published 2019. Paperback, 126pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95
ISBN 9781848616455 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Swinburne was born in 1837 in London and spent his childhood on the Isle of Wight and at his grandfather’s estate in Northumberland. He attended Eton and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he became friends with the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones. He had already published two verse plays when Atalanta in Calydon was released in 1865 to considerable acclaim. The following year, Poems and Ballads generated a firestorm of critical and public controversy: without gainsaying their extraordinary formal and musical accomplishments, reviewers attacked Swinburne’s poems for their licentiousness and anti-theism. His publisher withdrew the book within days of publication, and he was forced to transfer his works to another house.

Swinburne had invoked the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’ (derived from Gautier and Baudelaire) in defence of Poems and Ballads , but his next collection Songs Before Sunrise (1870) was a profoundly politically committed book, its poems dealing with the Italian Risorgimento and the more general human striving for freedom. That collection, the plays Bothwell (1874) and Erectheus (1876), and the 1878 Poems and Ballads, Second Series were far more favourably received by critics and the general reading public than the first Poems and Ballads had been.

Through the 1870s Swinburne was prodigiously active, publishing collections of poetry, plays, and critical studies. But his personal life was in alarming disarray, and his alcoholic dissipation forecast an almost certain early grave. In 1879, he was ‘rescued’ by the lawyer and writer Theodore Watts (later Watts-Dunton), who took him to a suburban retreat in Putney, weaned him from his drinking habit, and became his companion and de facto guardian for the rest of his life.

No Victorian poet suffered a more precipitous decline in reputation in the twentieth century than Swinburne. T. S. Eliot’s criticisms (in ‘Swinburne as Poet’, 1920)—that Swinburne’s work is ‘diffuse’, ‘imprecise’, metrically over-facile, and ultimately untethered to concrete reality—became common currency of dismissals of the poet. There is some truth to these critiques, and Swinburne certainly wrote far too much on trivial subjects in his later years. His formal and musical mastery, however, cannot be denied, and more recent readers have found in his work a surprising precision of language and subtlety and complexity of thought.

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