Swinburne is considered a poet of the Decadent school.[20] He wrote about many taboo topics, such as lesbianism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism. His poems have many common motifs, such as the ocean, time, and death. Rumours about his perversions often filled the broadsheets, and he ironically used to play along, confessing to being a pederast and having sex with monkeys.[21]
In France, Swinburne was highly praised by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and was invited to contribute to a book in honour of the poet Théophile Gautier, Le tombeau de Théophile Gautier (Wikisource): he answered by six poems in French, English, Latin and Greek.
In the United States, horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft considered Swinburne "the only real poet in either England or America after the death of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe."[22]
Renee Vivien, the English poet, was highly impressed with Swinburne and often included quotes of him in her works.[23]
T. S. Eliot read Swinburne's essays on the Shakespearean and Jonsonian dramatists in The Contemporaries of Shakespeare and The Age of Shakespeare and Swinburne's books on Shakespeare and Jonson. Writing on Swinburne in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, Eliot wrote Swinburne had mastered his material, and "he is a more reliable guide to [these dramatists] than Hazlitt, Coleridge, or Lamb: and his perception of relative values is almost always correct". Eliot wrote that Swinburne, as a poet, "mastered his technique, which is a great deal, but he did not master it to the extent of being able to take liberties with it, which is everything."[24] Furthermore, Eliot disliked Swinburne's prose, about which he wrote "the tumultuous outcry of adjectives, the headstrong rush of undisciplined sentences, are the index to the impatience and perhaps laziness of a disorderly mind.".[25]
Swinburne was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1903 to 1909. In 1908 he was one of the main candidates considered for the prize, and was nominated again in 1909.[26][27][28]
Selections from his poems were translated into French by Gabriel Mourey: Poèmes et ballades d'Algernon Charles Swinburne (Paris, Albert Savine, 1891), incorporating notes by Guy de Maupassant; and Chants d'avant l'aube de Swinburne (Paris, P.-V. Stock, 1909). Gabriele D'Annunzio repeatedly emulated Swinburne in his own poetry, and it is believed that his acquaintance with Swinburne was primarily through Mourey's French translations.[29]
Verse drama
- The Queen Mother (1860)
- Rosamond (1860)
- Chastelard (1865)
- Bothwell (1874)
- Mary Stuart (1881)
- Marino Faliero (1885)
- Locrine (1887)
- The Sisters (1892)
- Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards (1899)
Prose drama
- La Soeur de la reine (published posthumously 1964)
Poetry
- Atalanta in Calydon (1865)†
- Poems and Ballads (1866)
- Songs Before Sunrise (1871)
- Songs of Two Nations' (1875)
- Erechtheus (1876)†
- Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878)
- Songs of the Springtides (1880)
- Studies in Song (1880)
- The Heptalogia, or the Seven against Sense. A Cap with Seven Bells (1880)
- Tristram of Lyonesse (1882)
- A Century of Roundels (1883)
- A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems (1884)
- Poems and Ballads, Third Series (1889)
- Astrophel and Other Poems (1894)
- The Tale of Balen (1896)
- A Channel Passage and Other Poems (1904)
- ^† Although formally tragedies, Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus are traditionally included with "poetry".
Criticism
- William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868, new edition 1906)
- Under the Microscope (1872)
- George Chapman: A Critical Essay (1875)
- Essays and Studies (1875)
- A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877)
- A Study of Shakespeare (1880)
- A Study of Victor Hugo (1886)
- A Study of Ben Johnson (1889)
- Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894)
- The Age of Shakespeare (1908)
- Shakespeare (1909)
Major collections
- The poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 6 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1904.
- The Tragedies of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 5 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1905.
- The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, 20 vols. Bonchurch Edition; London and New York: William Heinemann and Gabriel Wells, 1925–7.
- The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. 1959–62.
- Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Terry L. Meyers, 3 vols. 2004.
