Algernon Swinburne
From Philosopedia
Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837–1909)
The London-born Swinburne was brought up piously, but before his twenty-first year he had abandoned all belief in Christianity.
Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) were attacked for their pagan sentiments and sensuality, and this English Victorian poet was an iconoclast in virtually all he undertook. His Atalanta in Calydon (1865) denounced “the supreme evil, God,” a phrase which disturbed, among others, Christina Rossetti.
The book’s aggressive hedonism and skepticism was liked by generations of younger readers. His contempt for theism also repudiates the asceticism of Christianity, in keeping with his being a nominal Unitarian.
“Hertha” he described as one of his “mystic atheistic democratic anthropologic” poems that contained “the most in it of my deliberate thought and personal feeling or faith.” In Songs Before Sunrise (1871), Swinburne glorifies freethought and republicanism.
Joseph McCabe wrote of Swinburne:
- Like Shelley he became an atheist and a republican at Oxford and, although he somehow blended his hatred of tyrants - he openly rejoiced when Orsini tried to assassinate Napoleon III and wrote magnificent poems in praise of European rebels - with High Toryism in domestic politics, he never wavered. In some of his Poems and Ballads he is very contemptuous of Christianity and its ascetic rules.
Considered "excitable" as a youth and enjoying a reputation as a decadent, Swinburne was rescued from alcoholism and ill health by legal adviser and fellow poet Theodore Watts-Dunston, in whose home he lived in comfort for 30 years.
With Watts-Dunston help in keeping him away from alcohol, he continued to write works that, according to McCabe, "showed more plainly how little religion is needed for great artistic inspiration. 'Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things,' is his keynote" (from "Hymn to Man").
The story is told in The Alyson Almanac (1989) that when he was living alone with a monkey on the Isle of Wight Swinburne invited a person home and, “once there, began making advances on the young man. The monkey, overcome with jealousy, attacked his guest, who ran away.”
Biographical Sketch
An online NNDB biography includes the following:
- Meanwhile, his private life was disturbed by troublous influences. A favorite sister died at East Dene, and was buried in the little shady churchyard of Bonchurch. Her loss overwhelmed the poet's father with grief, and he could no longer tolerate the house that was so full of tender memories. So the family moved to Holmwood, in the Thames Valley, near Reading, and the poet, being now within sound of the London literary world, grew anxious to mix in the company of the small body of men who shared his sympathies and tastes. Rooms were found for him in North Crescent, off Oxford Street; and he was drawn into the vortex of London life.
- The Pre-Raphaelite movement was in full swing, and for the next few years he was involved in a rush of fresh emotions and rapidly changing loyalties. It is indeed necessary to any appreciation of Swinburne's genius that one should understand that his inspiration was almost invariably derivative. His first book is deliberately Shakespearian in design and expression; the Atalanta, of course, is equally deliberate in its pursuit of the Hellenic spirit. Then, with a wider swing of the pendulum, he recedes, in Poems and Ballads, to the example of Charles Baudelaire and of the Pre-Raphaelites themselves; with the Song of Italy (1867) he is drawing towards the revolt of Giuseppe Mazzini; by the time Songs before Sunrise are completed (in 1871) he is altogether under the influence of Victor Hugo, while Rome has become to him "first name of the world's names."
- But, if Swinburne's inspiration was derivative, his manner was in no sense imitative; he brought to poetry a spirit entirely his own, and a method even more individual than his spirit. In summing up his work we shall seek to indicate wherein his originality and his service to poetry has lain; meanwhile, it is well to distinguish clearly between the influences which touched him and the original, personal fashion in which he assumed those influences, and made them his own.
- The spirit of Swinburne's muse was always a spirit of revolution. In Poems and Ballads the revolt is against moral conventions and restraints; in Songs before Sunrise the arena of the contest is no longer the sensual sphere, but the political and the ecclesiastical. The detestation of kings and priests, which marked so much of the work of his maturity, is now in full swing, and Swinburne's language is sometimes tinged with extravagance and an almost virulent animosity. With Bothwell (1874) he returned to drama and the story of Mary Stuart. The play has fine scenes and is burning with poetry, but its length not only precludes patient enjoyment, but transcends all possibilities of harmonious unity. Erechtheus (1876) was a return to the Greek inspiration of Atalanta; and then in the second series of Poems and Ballads (1878) the French influence is seen to be at work, and Victor Hugo begins to hold alone the place possessed, at different times, by Baudelaire and Mazzini.
- At this time Swinburne's energy was at fever height; in 1879 he published his eloquent Study of Shakespeare, and in 1880 no fewer than three volumes, The Modern Heptalogia, a brilliant anonymous essay in parody, Songs of the Springtides, and Studies in Song.
- It was shortly after this date that Swinburne's friendship for Theodore Watts-Dunton (then Theodore Watts) grew into one of almost more than brotherly intimacy. After 1880 Swinburne's life remained without disturbing event, devoted entirely to the pursuit of literature in peace and leisure.
- The conclusion of the Elizabethan trilogy, Mary Stuart, was published in 1881, and in the following year Tristram of Lyonesse, a wonderfully individual contribution to the modern treatment of the Arthurian legend, in which the heroic couplet is made to assume opulent, romantic cadences of which it had hitherto seemed incapable. Among the publications of the next few years must be mentioned A Century of Roundels (1883); A Mid-summer Holiday (1884); and Miscellanies (1886). The current of his poetry, indeed, continued unchecked; and though it would be vain to pretend that he added greatly either to the range of his subjects or to the fecundity of his versification, it is at least true that his melody was unbroken, and his magnificent torrent of words inexhaustible. His Marino Falicro (1885) and Locrine (1887) have passages of power and intensity unsurpassed in any of his earlier work, and the rich metrical effects of Astrophel(1894) and The Tale of Balin (1896) are inferior in music and range to none but his own masterpieces. In 1899 appeared his Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards; in 1908 his Duke of Gardia; and in 1904 was begun the publication of a collected edition of his Poems and Dramas in eleven volumes.
The Final Years
Upon his death in 1909, to quote his lines on the death of Edward Trelawny, Swinburne was “moored at last on the stormless shore.” His complete works, in twenty volumes, were edited by Edmund Gosse and T. J. Wise.
He died after a brief attack of influenza followed by pneumonia. Up to the last he chatted with his friends, and his illness was brief and almost painless. Swinburne was buried in the cemetery at Bonchurch “in the midst of the graves of his family.” His will directed that there should be no religious ceremony at his funeral; however, his executor, Watts-Dunton, allowed the rector of Bonchurch to read part of the Church of England burial service, and to offer some pious reflections of his own. Several of those present cried “Shame!”
(See entry for Vivian de Sola Pinto, who wrote about his being an atheist.
{BDF; CE; CL; EU, Terry L. Meyers; Freethinker, 25 April 1909; FFRF; GL; JM; JMR; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
