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Informationen zum Autor Algernon Swinburne (Author) Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in 1837 of an aristocratic family connected to Northumberland. He was educated for a time at Eton (where he may have developed his fascination with flagellation) and later matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford. There he met and formed lasting friendships with Pre-Raphaelite artists and writers, including William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Over the next few years, he travelled in France and Italy, wrote many poems, and led a Bohemian life in London. He lived for a time in Tudor House, with Rossetti. Under the influence of the death of his sister, the end of his romantic attachment to his cousin Mary Gordon, and the collapse of the Tudor House household and his strained friendship with Rossetti, Swinburne wrote Atalanta in Calydon, published in 1865, the work that first brought him critical notice; Tennyson praised it highly. Poems and Ballads appeared in the next year and brought sensational success and the angry attention of critics who were outraged by its choice of topics (sadomasochism, lesbianism, necrophilia, and the rejection of Christianity). His behaviour and bouts of drinking became worse, and he was often rescued by his family. Eventually, in 1879, he was taken to live with his friend Theodore Watts (later Watts-Dunton) in Putney, under whose watchful eye Swinburne's health improved and drinking ceased. Many more volumes of poetry followed, including the second and third series' of Poems and Ballads (1878 and 1889) and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). In addition, he published many dramas and works of literary criticism. He wrote in a wide variety of literary forms, from classical verse styles to medieval and Renaissance genres, from burlesques to ballads and roundels, and had a large influence on early Modern poets. Swinburne lived in comparative seclusion with Watts-Dunton at The Pines, Putney, until his death in 1909. Klappentext Republican, pagan, a sensualist alive to pleasure and to pain, Swinburne flouted the rules of Victorian decorum and morality in his life and work He created a unique means of expression through what Tennyson called his 'wonderful rhythmic invention', and yet his verse was influenced by poets from numerous periods and countries. Many of his poems are opulent hymns to sensual love, in all its aspects, and to death and to the loss of love. Swinburne's verse is immensely diverse in form: together these two works demonstrate its rich complexity and variety. As T. S. Eliot remarked, there is no reason to call his power over words anything but genius. This volume brings together Swinburne's major poetic works, Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866). Atalanta in Calydon is a drama in classical Greek form, which revealed Swinburne's metrical skills and brought him celebrity. Poems and Ballads brought him notoriety and demonstrates his preoccupation with de Sade, masochism, and femmes fatales. Also reproduced here is 'Notes on Poems and Reviews', a pamphlet Swinburne published in 1866 in response to hostile reviews of Poems and Ballads. In addition, this Penguin edition contains a preface, a table of dates, a commentary on the poems and two appendices, one of which is a map of the places mentioned in Atalanta in Calydon. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Zusammenfassung Brings together the author's poetic works, "Atalanta in Calydon" (1865) and "Poems and B...
