He was a Victorian era English poet who was born the 5th April 1837 in Grosvenor Place, London, but spent most of his boyhood on the Isle of Wight, where both his parents and grandparents had homes, and died the 10th April 1909. His poetry was highly controversial in its day, much of it containing recurring themes of sadomasochism, death-wish, lesbianism and irreligion.
On the Isle of Wight attended Eton College 1849-53, where he first started writing poetry. At university he associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and counted among his best friends Dante Gabriel Rossetti. After university he lived in London and started an active writing career.
With Shelley and Byron, he is one of the very few poets since the days of Raleigh and Sidney to come from the aristocracy.
He had an extremely excitable disposition: people who met him described him as a "demoniac boy" who would go skipping about the room declaiming poetry at the top of his voice. In this as in many things, he seems to have eschewed moderation. Once or twice he had fits, perhaps epileptic, in public; but he made this condition much worse by drinking past excess to unconsciousness. More than once while he was living with Rossetti he was delivered to the door in the small of the night, dead drunk. Throughout the 1860s and '70s he rode an alcoholic cycle of dissolution, collapse, drying out at home in the country. His health suffered as a result, and in 1879 at the age of 42 he had a mental and physical breakdown. Then he returned to London where he would begin all over again.
His poetry follows the by now standard pattern of early flourish and later decline; some of the fresher pieces in the second and third series of Poems and Ballads (1878 and 1889) were actually written during his days at Oxford. Nevertheless, his last collection, A Channel Passage, has some lovely poems, including "The Lake of Gaube." He is best remembered as the supreme technician in metre, with a versatility which exceeds even Tennyson's, but which lacks a corresponding emotional range.
His poetic works includes: Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Poems and Ballads I (1866), Songs before Sunrise (1871), Poems and Ballads II, (1878) Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), Poems and Ballads III (1889), and the novel Lesbia Brandon (published posthumously).
Swinburne's work was once quite popular among undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge, though today it has largely gone out of fashion.
It was Swinburne's misfortune that the two works, published when he was nearly 30, soon established him as England's premier poet, the successor to Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.
For Swinburne, there was a fundamental and particularly philosophical connection between passion and politics. Of course, the clearest precedents for this connection appear in Swinburne's Romantic precursors, principally Blake and Shelley. However, no matter how clearly Swinburne's political poems rely upon the precedents set by these two poets, the way in which he perceives passion, especially in its relationship to political philosophy, is more closely associated to courtly patterns than to Romantic ones, especially in its tragic qualities. Swinburne defines passion as a source of suffering, not like Blake joy or Shelley spiritual redemption. In this he was more like Keats; but in Keats's work we find no systematic relationship between politics and passion, as we do in Blake and Shelley on the one hand, and Swinburne and the troubadours on the other.