page_title: Algernon Charles Swinburne
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Algernon Charles Swinburne / Work
caption_attribution_description: English: 16 Cheyne WalkThis is a photo of listed building number 1080687.
context_page_description: Algernon Charles Swinburne 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 about 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, Anactoria, Jesus and Catullus.
context_section_description: Swinburne's poetic works include: Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Poems and Ballads (1866), Songs before Sunrise (1871), Poems and Ballads Second Series, (1878) Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), Poems and Ballads Third Series (1889), and the novel Lesbia Brandon (published posthumously in 1952).
  Poems and Ballads caused a sensation when it was first published, especially the poems written in homage of Sappho of Lesbos such as "Anactoria" and "Sapphics": Moxon and Co. transferred its publication rights to John Camden Hotten.  Other poems in this volume such as "The Leper," "Laus Veneris," and "St Dorothy" evoke a Victorian fascination with the Middle Ages, and are explicitly mediaeval in style, tone and construction. Also featured in this volume are "Hymn to Proserpine", "The Triumph of Time" and "Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)".
  Swinburne devised the poetic form called the 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 as the song "Roundel: The little eyes that never knew Light".
  Swinburne was influenced by the work of William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Catullus, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Victor Hugo. Swinburne was popular in England during his life, but his influence has greatly decreased since his death.
  After the first Poems and Ballads, Swinburne's later poetry increasingly was devoted to celebrations of republicanism and revolutionary causes, particularly in the volume Songs before Sunrise. “A Song of Italy” is dedicated to Mazzini; “Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic” is dedicated to Victor Hugo; and “Dirae” is a sonnet sequence of vituperative attacks against those Swinburne believed to be enemies of liberty. Erechtheus is the culmination of Swinburne's republican verse.  
  He did not stop writing love poetry entirely, including his great epic-length poem Tristram of Lyonesse, but its content is much less shocking than those of his earlier love poetry. His versification, and especially his rhyming technique, remain in top form to the end.
caption: Blue plaque at 16 Cheyne Walk
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