Algernon Charles Swinburne

gigatos | January 25, 2022

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Summary

Algernon Charles Swinburne (London, April 5, 1837 – Putney, April 10, 1909) was a Victorian-era British poet and playwright.

Active in the aesthetic, romantic and then decadent circle, he met Oscar Wilde and other famous intellectuals and artists of the same environment, attending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and befriending Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Eccentric personality, with a strong taste for artistic provocation, inspired by men of letters such as the Marquis de Sade, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charles Baudelaire, in his time his poetry was very controversial, because of its themes (his poetry is also characterized by original versificatory solutions, the cult of paganism and the idealized Middle Ages, and absolute freedom. From 1903 to 1909 he was consistently nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. With Alfred Edward Housman, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Ernest Dowson and William Butler Yeats, he is considered one of the most representative lyric poets of Victorian literature.

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Origins and education

He was born into an aristocratic family in London, at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place. His father was Admiral Charles Henry, the son of a gentleman educated in France, accustomed to dress and think like a French aristocrat of the Ancien régime; his mother, Lady Jane, was the daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham.

He grew up on the Isle of Wight, where his parents had several properties, and at Capheaton Hall, near Wallington in Northumberland. He received his first education at home; his parents taught him French and Italian. At the same time he received a solid Anglican religious education. He had an adolescent passion for a cousin, Mary Gordon, who, however, to his great sorrow, left him to marry another.He then studied at Eton, then at Balliol College, Oxford, where he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, all three engaged, in 1857, to decorate with frescoes inspired by the Arthurian cycle the walls of the Oxford Union. He revealed exceptional talents in the study of literature and ancient languages.

However, he also distinguished himself for his lack of discipline and provocative poses. It was the director of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, who in consideration of his abilities once saved him from expulsion, for having celebrated in verse Felice Orsini (the Italian patriot who had tried to assassinate Napoleon III). However (as later Oscar Wilde) in 1859 it was not possible to avoid expulsion (the penalty, at English universities, was called rustication).

Poetic activity and eccentric personality

Some of his earliest and still admired compositions are part of the typically Victorian cult of the Middle Ages, and some of them hark back to that era in style, tone and construction (The Leper, Laus Veneris and St. Dorothy). It is evident in them that Swinburne worshipped Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom he had remarkable traits of analogy: he, too, had been born of an aristocratic family and harbored libertarian sentiments, and he, too, had been educated at Eton and distinguished himself in the passionate study of the classics; they had both been expelled for their ideas from college; but the similarity also extended to certain personal and character qualities, such as extreme fickleness, abundance of poetic vein, exhibited nonconformity, and nervousness in analogical play.

He left Oxford in 1860, forming an association with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Upon the death of the latter”s wife, Pre-Raphaelite model Elizabeth Siddal, who committed suicide in 1862, the poet and painter went to live together in Tudor House, No. 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Rossetti portrayed Swinburne a few times over the years according to the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, nicknaming him “little Northumbrian friend” because of his short stature (5 feet, or about 1.52 m). His build was awkward, his voice unpleasantly high-pitched and his attitude resigned, making Swinburne seemingly the furthest thing from the boldness expressed by his revolutionary verses; on the other hand, he had unsuspected physical strength (he was, among other things, the first to climb Culver Cliff in the Isle of Wight). He possessed, in addition, a highly excitable character, to which we owe occasional emphatic excesses, during which he declaimed verses in a loud voice, indulging in disproportionate gestures. Some morbid excesses he had in public, although very rare, gave rise to the idea that he was epileptic. The whole thing was made worse by his alcoholism, because of which he often had to be brought home, at the wee hours, by force of arms.

He had published only a few poems in a magazine when he published the dramatic poem (intended for reading only) Atalanta in Calydon (1865), which was an exceptional success. Only a year later, the scandalous verses of Laus Veneris and Poems and Ballads gave him a reputation as an immoral poet, triggering a campaign of defamation that many considered perfectly useless: many of the perversions described by Swinburne were purely literary. According to others Swinburne was bisexual, and had learned at Eton sadomasochistic erotic techniques such as, in particular, flagellation and self-flagellation; at least two homosexual relationships are attributed to him, with Richard Monckton Milnes, who made him discover De Sade, and with the traveler Richard Francis Burton. He often manifested masochistic attitudes or algolagnia, that is to reach sexual pleasure through physical pain, and this was his main sexual activity; a rumor has it that Dante Gabriel Rossetti tried to “convert him to heterosexuality” and make him abandon the practices of self-flagellation by making him meet the circus performer (she, giving up, would have said: “I can not make him understand that biting is useless”. Swinburne had an affair with Menken for six weeks: Rossetti is said to have offered her money to get Swinburne away from the flagellation, but after a month and a half she had to give up the challenge and return the money. Already in the unpublished early drama of 1858-1859, Laugh and Lie Down, Swinburne sketches the erotic characteristics of a woman that returns throughout his production: the protagonist Imperia is libertine, dissolute, imperious and cruel, thus anticipating the novels of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, such as Venus in Fur (1870).

He is considered a poet and a typical decadent personality, although he flaunted more vices than he actually had, a fact on which Oscar Wilde had to pronounce in a rather salacious way. The chatter about him, far from discouraging him, spurred him to take more and more provocative attitudes, until he let run on himself rumors that he was a pederast, and even the lover of a monkey. According to Oscar Wilde none of this was true; for him, Swinburne was just “a fanfare, about his own vices, who has done everything possible to convince the world of his homosexuality and bestiality when he was neither homosexual nor bestial”.

In 1864 he made a trip to Italy, stopping for a short time between Florence and Fiesole. In 1868 Swinburne rented with a friend, George Powell, a house in Étretat, baptizing it Chaumière de Dolmancé (“Dolmancé”s cottage”, named after a character in Sade”s The Philosophy in the Boudoir), where he spent his vacations, and received in the summer of 1870 a visit from the young Guy de Maupassant, who saved him from drowning (the poet was swimming in the sea of Normandy when he risked drowning, and Maupassant, a good swimmer, and others dove in and pulled him to safety) and in gratitude was invited to lunch and spend the day at the villa. According to what Maupassant told Edmond de Goncourt and Gustave Flaubert in 1875, the French writer was greatly impressed by the presence of human bones on a table, strange paintings on the walls, and a fully clothed lizard sleeping in Powell”s bed, as well as several exhibited oddities and eccentricities. Jean Lorrain is said to have been inspired by this tale, and Goncourt, in his novel La Fausta (1881) also inspired the character of Georges Selwyn, the sadistic lover of young girls, to Swinburne as he appears from Maupassant”s tale (the real Selwyn was actually a historical character of 18th century politician known for his sexual oddities and who had already inspired Charles Robert Maturin, Wilde”s uncle, for the Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer).

The years at The Pines

In 1877 his father died and began his economic problems. In 1878 Victor Hugo invited him publicly to Paris for the celebrations of the centenary of the death of Voltaire (May 30, 1778), but the English poet had to give up because of ill health, however, writing a funeral lament for Baudelaire (died in 1867). In 1879, almost unable to move and seriously ill since the winter of the previous year due to neglect, the complications of alcoholism and the strenuous poetic work to which he underwent anyway, Swinburne was on the verge of death; He was then taken under a sort of “guardianship” by his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton, a lawyer and his legal advisor (with the consent of Swinburne”s mother, Lady Jane, and sisters), who looked after him in the family villa at “The Pines”, Putney, near London (for the next thirty years, Swinburne lived at The Pines with his friend”s family, and was forced by Watts-Dunton to give up his dissipated life and to detoxify from alcohol. Watts-Dunton required him to stop hanging out with his old friends in London, to the point of restricting his activities and even checking his mail, requiring him to drink no more than a bottle of beer with lunch; it is believed that all of this almost certainly saved him from an early death.

This deep crisis, however, induced him to stop his youthful rebellious attitudes and to assume a certain social respectability, even if he continued to write, with less success than in the past (it has been said that Watts “saved the man but killed the poet”), but in an even more massive and conspicuous way, not only poetry (even the most numerous part of his production is of this period, and much was published posthumously) but dramas and essays of literary criticism, especially on authors of the Elizabethan period such as William Shakespeare. In 1882 he published a poem in memory of Rossetti, after receiving the news of the sudden death of his friend; the same year Swinburne and Watts-Dunton made a trip to France, where they met the elderly Victor Hugo for dinner, but Swinburne rarely moved from Putney, refusing even a subsequent trip to Cambridge on his return from France. In 1896 his mother died, at age 87, celebrated by his son with the double elegy The High Oaks: Barking Hall.

His social isolation was accentuated by the onset of deafness; in 1903 he fell seriously ill with pneumonia but survived, although he remained with respiratory problems. In the spring of 1909 Swinburne contracted influenza, developing pneumonia again, and died at the age of 72, in the home of his friend, on the morning of April 10. On April 15, 1909 he was buried in the cemetery of St. Boniface (the funeral attended by friends, admirers and his only living relative, the youngest sister, Isabel.

His mastery of vocabulary, rhyme, and meter probably place him among the most gifted English poets of all time, although he has also been much criticized for his pompous style and lexical choices “for rhyme” rather than “for meaning.” He is the implied hero of the third volume of George Saintsbury”s capital History of English Prosody, and Alfred Edward Housman, a more measured and sometimes even hostile critic, devoted many laudatory paragraphs to his skill as a rhymer.

Swinburne”s work experienced a certain popularity among Oxford and Cambridge students, although it meets much less public taste today. The same has been true of the general public and critics, except for Poems and Ballads. First Series and Atalanta in Calydon, which have always enjoyed high favor in academic circles.

Swinburne”s disadvantage was that he was consecrated the first English poet, and the successor of Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, around the age of 30, after the publication of his first two works. He retained this prestige until his death, but knowledgeable critics such as Alfred Edward Housman perceived, rightly or wrongly, that placing him among the greatest English poets was a stretch too far. It is likely that Swinburne himself was aware of this. Gifted with a very fine intelligence, he himself, in his maturity, active as a critic, was convinced that old age entailed increasing cynicism and insincerity.

Growing old, for him, was obviously not an easy thing. But all of Swinburne”s work, whose formal sense and boldness of many solutions are more appreciated, is the work of construction of a genius of the word, in which it is very difficult to grasp the most sincere motive of inspiration. For this reason, the definition that Walt Whitman gave of him, that damned simulacrum, has remained famous: ready to accept in his poetic universe, with an attitude of experimenter, arguments, suggestions, shapes, colors from wherever they came, according to the critic Richard Church has not brought to perfect inner maturity any of the issues addressed.

After the first Poems and Ballads, which scandalized for the poems with erotic and sadomasochistic themes such as Anactoria, inspired by the events of Sappho (“Ah, s”io potessi bermi le tue veins

He still wrote love poetry, but with less traumatizing contents. His versification technique, especially the inventiveness in the use of rhyme, remained excellent until the end.

His works include: Atalanta in Calydon, Tristram of Lyonesse, other Poems and Ballads (separated into Series I, II, and III, the latter containing the most controversial part of his work), Songs before Sunrise, and Lesbia Brandon (published posthumously).

Thomas Stearns Eliot, reading Swinburne”s essays on Elizabethan playwrights in The Contemporaries of Shakespeare and The Age of Shakespeare, and Swinburne”s books on William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, noted that, being also a poet”s observations on other poets, he nevertheless had such a command of the subject as to make him “a more reliable guide than Hazlitt, Coleridge, or Lamb,” Swinburne”s three Romantic predecessors. He noted, however, about Swinburne”s prose, “a tumultuous flurry of adjectives, a ceaseless profusion of disorganized sentences, are indicative of the undisciplined and perhaps even lazy nature of a disordered mind.”

Swinburne”s poem is quoted in Jack London”s novel Martin Eden; the protagonist in particular reads the last four lines of the penultimate stanza before committing suicide. These are lines from the poem The Garden of Proserpine (not to be confused with the almost homonymous Hymn to Proserpine, where the poet sings of the rise of late antique Christianity and laments the end of classical Roman paganism).

In Swinburne converge in fact the love for Greek mythology and Hellenic religion, modern cursing and the charm of medieval Christianity, under the influence of the Arthurian cycle, a typical theme of Pre-Raphaelism.

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Biographies

Edmund Gosse”s (1917) and Georges Lafourcade”s (1932) are notable.

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Critical Studies

Sources