I lived from 1837-1909. I was from England, and am in the English category.
Swinburne was born into an old aristocratic family. He was sent to Eton, where he acquired a taste for flagellation, and Oxford, where he became friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, of which he was briefly a member.
His second volume of poetry, a drama in classical style, brought him praise. His next two volumes, Poems and Ballads (1866), were heavily influenced by de Sade, Baudelaire, and the French symbolists.
This work was reviled by critics, most famously by Robert Buchanan, who attacked Swinburne and Rossetti in "The Fleshly School of Poetry," though it influenced contemporaries like Wilde and Yeats and modernists such as Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Swinburne suffered a breakdown in the 1870s but continued to write, in genres ranging from lyric poetry and satire to pornography, for the remainder of his life. Much of his work remains unpublished.
His second volume of poetry, a drama in classical style, brought him praise. His next two volumes, Poems and Ballads (1866), were heavily influenced by de Sade, Baudelaire, and the French symbolists.
This work was reviled by critics, most famously by Robert Buchanan, who attacked Swinburne and Rossetti in "The Fleshly School of Poetry," though it influenced contemporaries like Wilde and Yeats and modernists such as Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Swinburne suffered a breakdown in the 1870s but continued to write, in genres ranging from lyric poetry and satire to pornography, for the remainder of his life. Much of his work remains unpublished.
Popular poetry
- Love lies bleeding in the bed whereover
Roses lean with smiling mouths or pleading:11 lines, 4 comments - Dead love, by treason slain, lies stark,
White as a dead stark-stricken dove:11 lines, 7 comments - Between the wave-ridge and the strand
I let you forth in sight of land,369 lines - A little soul scarce fledged for earth
Takes wing with heaven again for goal78 lines - Three months bade wane and wax the wintering moon
Between two dates of death, while men were fain45 lines - Orpheus, the night is full of tears and cries,
And hardly for the storm and ruin shed14 lines, 1 comment - Time, thy name is sorrow, says the stricken
Heart of life, laid waste with wasting flame25 lines
