SWINBURNE ALGERNON, CHARLES. – English poet, born in London on 5 April 1837, died at Putney Hill on 10 April 1909.
He made his debut by publishing the two dramas The Queen Mother and Rosamond. In 1861 he visited Italy and returned there in 1864, the year in which he met Walter Savage Landor in Florence. In the meantime he had come into contact with D. G. Rossetti and G. Meredith. In 1865 he published the drama Atalanta in Calydon; in 1866, Poems and Ballads, which gave rise to lively controversy: the poet became known to the general public for his independence from Victorian tradition, in the field of politics as well as morality. His political passion is attested by the following works: Song of Italy, from 1867, the year in which he met Mazzini, and Songs before Sunrise (1871), inspired by the republican ideal and contemporary Italian history. In all the works that followed (Poems and Ballads, 1878, 1889; the drama Erechters, 1876; the chivalric poem Tristram of Lyonesse, 1882), the poet returned to the forms and themes of his poetry, but with an already wearied vein.
His activity as a critic, marked by particular sensitivity and breadth of interests, deserves notice (William Blake, A Critical study, 1867; A Study of Shakespeare, 1879; A Study of Victor Hugo, 1886).
In his poetry, typical of the end of the century, the various influences of the Pre-Raphaelites, Landor, the early Romantics, and the Greek and Latin poets can be recognized. Eloquence often prevails over song; nevertheless, his tendency toward pure musical expression and his sense of the beauty of words and of their position in the verse are always extremely vivid. In any case, his most genuine inspiration is to be found more in the poems dominated by sensual obsession and a soft sense of death than in the patriotic poems, in which the influence of Victorian rhetoric is more evident. The partly positive value of his work as poet and critic is confirmed by the influence he exerted on Walter Pater and on other writers of the following generation.