Swinburne, ALGERNON CHARLES, was born in London on April 5, 1837, but belongs to a Northumbrian family, being the son of Admiral Swinburne and of Lady Jane Henrietta, the daughter of the Earl of Ashburnham. He was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford, which he entered in 1857 and which he left without taking a degree. He then spent some time in travelling on the Continent, and in 1864 he visited Walter Savage Landor at Florence. On his return to
England he became closely associated with Dante Rossetti and William Morris, and his life has thenceforth been that of a man of letters and has been mainly spent in London. His first book, a tragedy entitled The Queen Mother and Rosamund, was published in 1861, but did not excite much attention. It was otherwise with Atalanta in Calydon, which appeared in 1864, and proved that a new singer with an exquisite lyrical gift had arisen. Mr Swinburne has produced no poem of similar length so full of beauties as Atalanta; and there are some, and these, perhaps, not the least competent judges of his verse, by whom this drama is even now more dearly prized than any other of its author's works. The tragedy of Chastelard was deservedly far less successful, and in 1866 the first series of Poems and Ballads awakened a storm of adverse criticism. The outcry was in the main unjust; but one or two of the pieces had better not have been written, and the language of others was now and then such as to give a colour of plausibility to the strictures passed on the book. The finest pieces, Hesperia, Itylus, A Match, The Garden of Proserpine, the Hymn to Proserpine, The Triumph of Time—these, to name but these, were a revelation to students of English verse. The writer struck a note which none had struck before. You might object, and now and then rightly object, to the erotic tone of certain passages, but there was no resisting the lyric fire and the consummate artistry, the magnificence of the rhythm, the new, strange sweetness of the music. A Song of Italy appeared in 1867 and an Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic in 1871. By the publication in the latter year of Songs before Sunrise Mr Swinburne was again exposed to censure, extravagant in part and in part not unmerited. There is much admirable verse—fiery and ringing and technically perfect—in the volume; it contains, however, no such fascinating masterpieces of lyric art as the best of the Poems and Ballads, and to most readers the political opinions held by Mr Swinburne at the time of its composition will appear to be visionary and crude, and to be often intemperately urged. In 1871 Mr Robert Buchanan attacked Dante Rossetti and Mr Swinburne on the score of the alleged immoral tendency of their verse; the accuser's pamphlet, The Fleshly School, drawing forth a counter pamphlet, Under the Microscope, from Mr Swinburne. Bothwell, a long chronicle play, without any attempt at theateric structure, in which historic truth, so far as understood by the poet, was made the primary quest, appeared in 1874; Erechtheus, a noble lyric drama, extremely unlike Atalanta, inasmuch as it was written with great exactitude (even as to the number of its verses) upon the lines of a Greek drama, in 1875; and a second series of Poems and Ballads in 1878. Since then their author has issued Songs of the Springtides; Songs of Two Nations; Studies in Song; A Century of Roundels; Marino Faliero; Locrine, a rhymed tragedy; Tristram of Lyonesse, a fine narrative poem in decasyllabic couplets; Mary Stuart, a play completing the trilogy begun in Chastelard and continued in Bothwell; and a third series of Poems and Ballads, containing the superb sea-and-battle piece, The Armada, in 1887. The Sisters, a short tragedy of modern life, published in 1892, was less favourably received than any of his previous works. Mr Swinburne's prose works include two volumes of critical essays (on Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Rossetti, Tennyson, Musset, &c.), and separate studies of William Blake, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, Charlotte Brontë, Hugo, and Shakespeare. He has one pre-eminent excellence as a critic, the faculty of discerning and giving the most generous recognition to literary merit in its most dissimilar forms—in Congreve as in Wordsworth, in Pope as in Webster, in Anthony Trollope as in Cyril Tourneur. The genius of Victor Hugo, however, has been unto him even as a siren, his idolatry of the great romanticist not only finding expression in immoderate eulogy, but prompting him now and then to belittle the works of other poets—most notably those of Alfred de Musset. The merits and defects of his prose style were at first almost equally striking. He abused his magnificent command of epithet, he was super-emphatic, and he frequently employed figures which are only admissible in verse. These defects are much less conspicuous in his later essays, and in his finest passages it would be hard to excel the splendid glow and ornate grace of the diction and the stately mould of the sentences.
Mr Swinburne is the greatest metrical inventor in English literature. Other poets have equalled him in melody, but none other has revealed the tunefulness and pliancy, the majesty and grace of the English speech in such a variety of lyrical forms. He can impart dignity and distinction to the simplest measures, and move with faultless ease in the most elaborate. He can take a thing like the roundel, a form which seemed to be only adapted for ingenious trifling, and render it a sonorous instrument for brooding thought or impassioned imagination. He can give rapid and graceful movement to heavy-laden, long-drawn metres which other artists in verse would find unworkably cumbrous. He can stir the blood by the rush and resonance of a battle-chorus, or charm the ear by the music of a love-lyric as sweet as the songs of spring. His music is like no other man's, and whether the verses are running lightly, marching proudly, or swinging impetuously, the music is alike irresistible. He has been accused of tautology and obscurity, and even of drowning sense in sound. He has no doubt a tendency to use redundant phrases and unfamiliar inversions, and to carry alliteration to excess. But the charge of obscurity has been generally urged in ignorance of his aims and from misappreciation of his craftsmanship. With the possible exception of Gérard de Nerval, he is the modern poet whose aims and methods approach most closely to the musician's. Vague Mr Swinburne sometimes is; but he is so most often of artistic intent. Words which may at first seem pleonastic and even meaningless are discovered on further reading to have been inserted with delicate art to deepen the impression of mystery or beauty which the writer sought to suggest by the verbal music of a given passage. In dealing with nature his endeavour is not to produce a minute transcript, but to render the spirit of a scene, to catch and convey the elusive haunting secret of its loveliness or its terror. The Garden of Cymodoce admirably illustrates his descriptive method. You feel at first as if the meaning of certain phrases were escaping you; but as you read, the charm, at once daunting and seductive, of the wonderful sea-hall—the magic of the lovely crimson glimmer and of the gloom which seems to dilate above the black silent water—is borne in upon you by the suggestion of the music, the subtle verbal colouring and shading, the premeditated vagueness of certain lines, as it could never have been by any number of direct and minute descriptive touches. The poem is as perfect in one way as Keats's Hymn to Pan is in another. Of all our poets Mr Swinburne is the poet of the sea. He knows the ocean in all its moods; he has rendered with equal perfection the revel of storming surges, the magnificent rolling of deep-sea billows, the soft glow of the bowers of the water-world, the sensuous delight of a swimmer swimming out as the morning breaks over the green rippling deep. His versatility has not yet gained due recognition. He has dealt with the most various subjects and drunk inspiration from the most various sources; he has worked as a lyric, a narrative, and a dramatic poet; in style he has ranged from the most ornate manner to the most austere. None of his later volumes can awaken the delight with which his readers greeted the outburst of soaring song and lyric fire in Atalanta. The joy of that surprise can never be renewed. And in splendour of rhythm, in witchery of phrase, in passionate imaginative glow the last series does not and could not well surpass the first series of Poems and Ballads. But in nobility of aspiration, width of sympathy, and bracing love of nature the advance is indubitable. In the early poems (saving Atalanta) the air was too often as that of a hothouse; it was enervating to linger in the society of Felice and Yolande and Juliette. But the old languor and pessimism have passed away; the mournful amnist of the First Series, the indignant rebel of Songs before Sunrise, has become the exultant singer of the sea and the sea-wind, the high-hearted lyrist of the great deeds and imperial destiny of England. In the early poems we were transported to the clear-cut, clear-coloured hills of Greece and the drowsy garden-closes of the south; in the latest we hear the night-wind rushing over the 'mirk muir sides' of the Scottish Border and the Tyne roaring in spate. Mr Swinburne's plays, setting aside Atalanta, are of far inferior importance to his lyrics, though they contain noble passages of poetry, and though in his Mary Stuart he has achieved a triumph of dramatic creation.
Recent works are Astrophel (1894), Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894), and a Tale of Balen (1896). There are bibliographies by Shepherd (1887) and Wise.