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Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)

Autor(a) de Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne

197+ Works 1,548 Membros 5 Reviews 20 Favorited

About the Author

Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was born April 5, 1837 in Grosvenor Place, London, but spent most of his boyhood on the Isle of Wight, where both his parents and grandparents had homes. He was educated at Eton and Oxford University but was expelled from Oxford before he graduated. Although some of mostrar mais his work had already appeared in periodicals, Atalanta in Calydon was the first poem to come out under his name and was received enthusiastically. "Laus Veneris" and Poems and Ballads, with their sexually charged passages, were attacked all the more violently as a result. Swinburne's meeting in 1867 with his long-time hero Mazzini, led to the more political Songs before Sunrise. In 1879, with Swinburne nearly dead from alcoholism and dissolution, his legal advisor Theodore Watts-Dunton took him in, and was successful in getting him to adopt a healthier style of life. Swinburne lived the rest of his days at Watts-Dunton's house outside London. He saw less and less of his old friends, but his growing deafness accounts for some of his decreased sociability. He died of influenza in 1909. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos
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Obras de Algernon Charles Swinburne

Poems (1905) 67 cópias
Selected Poems (1950) 60 cópias
Poems and ballads (1873) 45 cópias
Songs Before Sunrise (1888) 34 cópias
Swinburne: The Penguin Poets (1961) 34 cópias
Lesbia Brandon (1952) 31 cópias
Selected poetry and prose (1968) 24 cópias
Tristram of Lyonesse (1917) 17 cópias
A Study of Shakespeare (1918) 16 cópias
Erechtheus: a tragedy (1876) 15 cópias
Laus Veneris (1866) 13 cópias
Poems and prose (1940) 12 cópias
The Springtide of Life (1918) 12 cópias
Choice of Verse (1973) 12 cópias
Astrophel and Other Poems (1894) 10 cópias
The Age of Shakespeare (1908) 10 cópias
Chastelard, a tragedy (2011) 9 cópias
Studies in song (1880) 8 cópias
A Century of Roundels (2011) 7 cópias
Swinburne, a selection (1960) 7 cópias
Selected verse (2015) 7 cópias
Dolores (1916) 6 cópias
The Tale of Balen (2011) 6 cópias
Songs of Two Nations (1875) 5 cópias
The Heptalogia (2012) 5 cópias
Algernon Charles Swinburne (2017) 4 cópias
Locrine: a tragedy (2008) 4 cópias
A Dark Month (2010) 4 cópias
The Duke Of Gandia (2004) 4 cópias
Essays and studies (1875) 4 cópias
UNDER THE MICROSCOPE. (1899) 4 cópias
Collected Poetical Works (1927) 4 cópias
The Posthumous Poems (1917) 3 cópias
Two Nations (2012) 3 cópias
Tragedies 3 cópias
Songs of the springtides (2008) 3 cópias
A study of Victor Hugo (1970) 3 cópias
The Best of Swinburne (1937) 3 cópias
Charles Dickens (1913) 3 cópias
The Sisters: A Tragedy (1892) 3 cópias
Shelley 2 cópias
Three Plays by Shakespeare (1909) 2 cópias
A note on Charlotte Brontë (1970) 2 cópias
Garden of Proserpine (1990) 2 cópias
A Song of Italy 2 cópias
Shakespeare (1909) 2 cópias
Pasiphae. A Poem (1950) 2 cópias
Loves Cross Currents 1 exemplar(es)
Poems-Poesie (1990) 1 exemplar(es)
Dikter i urval 1 exemplar(es)
Hymn to Proserpine 1 exemplar(es)
Love's Cross-Currents 1 exemplar(es)
Swinburne 1 exemplar(es)
Poèmes choisis (1990) 1 exemplar(es)
Anactoria (1989) 1 exemplar(es)
Poetry 1 exemplar(es)
Swinburne's Dramas 1 exemplar(es)
Letters: 1877-82 v. 4 (1960) 1 exemplar(es)
Works Volume 3 (2015) 1 exemplar(es)
Miscellanies (2011) 1 exemplar(es)
[The palace of Pan] 1 exemplar(es)
The brothers 1 exemplar(es)
Letters: 1883-90 v. 5 (1962) 1 exemplar(es)
Letters: 1890-1909 v. 6 (1962) 1 exemplar(es)
Letters: 1875-77 v. 3 (1960) 1 exemplar(es)
Bothwell: a tragedy 1 exemplar(es)
Letters 1 exemplar(es)
Queen Yseult 1 exemplar(es)
The Queen Mother 1 exemplar(es)
Siena 1 exemplar(es)
Swinburne ms. facsimiles 1 exemplar(es)
Lyrical poems 1 exemplar(es)
Dead love 1 exemplar(es)

Associated Works

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (1589) — Contribuinte, algumas edições31,576 cópias
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1910) — Appreciation, algumas edições14,061 cópias
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights (2001) — Contribuinte, algumas edições1,780 cópias
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000) — Contribuinte — 1,254 cópias
The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) — Introdução, algumas edições726 cópias
English Poetry, Volume III: From Tennyson to Whitman (1909) — Contribuinte — 607 cópias
A Pocket Book of Modern Verse (1954) — Contribuinte, algumas edições443 cópias
In the Nursery (1932) — Contribuinte — 285 cópias
The Literary Cat (1977) — Contribuinte — 241 cópias
The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983) — Contribuinte — 236 cópias
Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets [Norton Critical Edition] (1975) — Contribuinte — 229 cópias
Poems Bewitched and Haunted (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) (2005) — Contribuinte — 189 cópias
The Faber Book of Beasts (1997) — Contribuinte — 140 cópias
The Standard Book of British and American Verse (1932) — Contribuinte — 114 cópias
The Dedalus Book of Decadence (1990) — Contribuinte — 97 cópias
Byron's Poetry and Prose [Norton Critical Edition] (2009) — Contribuinte — 94 cópias
Storytelling and Other Poems (1949) — Contribuinte — 90 cópias
A Book of Narrative Verse (1930) — Contribuinte — 61 cópias
The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence the Black Feast (1992) — Contribuinte — 49 cópias
The Works of Robert Herrick: The Hesperides and Noble Numbers. 2 Volumes (1891) — Introdução, algumas edições35 cópias
Modern Arthurian Literature (1992) — Contribuinte — 31 cópias
The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales (1992) — Contribuinte — 24 cópias
The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories (2004) — Contribuinte — 20 cópias
Thomas Middleton (2013) — Introdução, algumas edições20 cópias
Masters of British Literature, Volume B (2007) — Contribuinte — 16 cópias
Christmas classics: A treasury for Latter-Day Saints (1995) — Contribuinte — 14 cópias
The Religion of Beauty: Selections from the Aesthetes (1950) — Contribuinte — 11 cópias
Men and Women: The Poetry of Love (1970) — Contribuinte — 8 cópias
Selected Ballads (2002) — Contribuinte — 5 cópias
La poesía inglesa románticos y victorianos — Contribuinte — 4 cópias
Poetry & prose : with Swinburne's poem and essays (1978) — Contribuinte, algumas edições3 cópias
Der Phoenix und die Taube - Englische Lyrik in deutscher Fassung (1991) — Contribuinte — 1 exemplar(es)
The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists: Thomas Middleton (1887) — Introdução — 1 exemplar(es)

Etiquetado

16th century (293) 17th century (289) 19th century (390) anthology (861) British (290) British literature (356) classic (1,343) classic literature (265) classics (1,682) collection (267) comedy (210) drama (2,538) Elizabethan (168) England (205) English (360) English literature (714) fiction (3,276) France (390) French (367) French literature (518) hardcover (269) historical fiction (342) history (207) literature (2,116) non-fiction (181) novel (325) own (232) Paris (252) play (463) plays (1,849) poetry (3,750) read (219) reference (238) Renaissance (208) sonnets (160) theatre (847) to-read (1,535) tragedy (219) unread (254) William Shakespeare (2,760)

Conhecimento Comum

Membros

Resenhas

Swinburne does Shelley and Blake. The world needs more ranting poetry.

"The wrongdoing is not ours, but ours the wrong,
Who hear too loud on earth and see too long
The grief that dies not with the groan that dies,
Till the strong bitterness of pity cries
Within us, that our anger should be strong."
 
Marcado
judeprufrock | Jul 4, 2023 |
As the lost white feverish limbs
Of the Lesbian Sappho, adrift
In foam where the sea-weed swims,
Swam loose for the seas to lift...


This is typical: it has Sappho, it has death, it has the sea. He was as much fixated on Sappho because she threw herself into the sea, as because in her he has a spokeswoman for himself and his explorations. Sappho's perfect for him, it's not just that he's a perv.

Swinburne writes endlessly about the sea. I tried his novels and remember a few pages on a drowning man, than which, I thought at the time, I never expect to find a more lifelike experience written down. But the sea's everywhere, and I bet he set himself the task to be like the sea: similar, yes, to itself, yesterday, but infinitely different, and who's bored by the sea? I don't know better sea descriptions.

Poems & Ballads was his first splash and highly notorious. He's more attached to French Decadents than the English Pre-Raphaelites – he was Baudelaire's champion in England. In brief he explores cruelty; first the cruel instincts in love, then outward to the cruelty of the world. His pagans attack Christianity as too optimistic a religion, and in that untrue – as well as being life-negative and anti-sensual.

'Faustine' is about a decadent Roman, a female Faust, a queen given over to evil and evil lusts, but magnificent. One of his gaudy poems, that can be quite funny:

You seem a thing that hinges hold,
A love-machine
With clockwork joints of supple gold –
No more, Faustine.


Is that steampunk?
More gaudy is 'Dolores', a tribute to “Our Lady of Pain”...

What tortures undreamt of, unheard of,
Unwritten, unknown?


Not any more. And published in Victorian England.
But onto more serious poetry. 'Hymn to Proserpine' has a note 'After the proclamation in Rome of the Christian faith'. It's a pagan's lament for things past and lost, and uses the sea again, with ocean-rhythms:

Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods?
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire ye shall pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.


I've spent most time with 'Anactoria', which is Sappho in first person to her absconded lover. She too moves from cruelty towards Anactoria, in her abandonment, to a metaphysical statement. I think 'Anactoria' is a great poem. And once you get past the lesbian sadism, it culminates in Sappho's triumph as a poet. That may be an old claim – I shall not die. I'm a poet – but where is the claim made better?

Sappho is not the weary sort, weary of life and sensation like Faustine; she's healthy, she has far too much self for that. Yes, she swings between moods, and has her exhausted death-moods:

I would the sea had hidden us, the fire
(Wilt thou fear that, and fear not my desire?)
Severed the bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves,
And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves.


But she's a presence, a personality, as the other women in this book aren't. She has a voice. Though at her lover's feet in one sentence, in the next she is above her, above her love. In her throes she can say, Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year/ When I love thee. You can see why Anactoria ran away. She has Aphrodite under thumb: Mine is she, very mine. Aphrodite offers her redress:

...and she bowed,
With all her subtle face laughing aloud,
Bowed down upon me, saying, 'Who doth thee wrong,
Sappho?'


She's nothing if not possessive:

That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat
Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet
Thy body were abolished and consumed
And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!


Her own cruelty morphs into that of God (singular):

For who shall change with prayers or thanksgivings,
The mystery of the cruelty of things?


And she goes on with a vision of the universe's cruelty. With a God behind it:

Is not his incense bitterness, his meat
Murder? his hidden face and iron feet
Hath not man known, and felt them on their way
Threaten and trample all things and every day?


On behalf of the suffering she declares,

Him would I reach, him smite, him desecrate;
Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath
And mix his immortality with death.


The last third shifts to her victory over Anactoria, and over death, and over God in fact.

Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine,
Except these kisses of my lips on thine
Brand them with immortality; but me –
Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea...


and so on and so on, without they think of Sappho, or know her, for I Sappho shall be one with all these things. This is her conquest of God:

But, having made me, me he shall not slay...
Of me the high God hath not all his will.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
Jakujin | Mar 10, 2013 |
These characters are articulate, clever, but very cold indeed.
 
Marcado
markbstephenson | Jun 5, 2010 |
The collected works of a significant, if often (I think) underrated, Victorian poet. Definitely worth reading by lovers of poetry and good English.
 
Marcado
Fledgist | Jan 13, 2008 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
197
Also by
40
Membros
1,548
Popularidade
#16,637
Avaliação
½ 4.3
Resenhas
5
ISBNs
175
Idiomas
5
Favorito
20

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