Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Algernon Charles Swinburne, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2305 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
ALEXANDER I believe thou liest not. Girl, the day Looks pale before thy glory. Brow, cheek, eye, Lips, throat, and bosom, thou dost overshine All womanhood man ever worshipped. Once I held thy mother fairest born of all That ever turned old Rome to heaven. Thou hast read Her golden Horace? ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
Flouting conventional Victorian attitudes about religion, politics, decorum and morality, Swinburne was a sensualist, alive to pleasure and to pain. He was a poet not of objects and things, or of word paintings, but of energies-of wind and water-and what Tennyson called wonderful rhythmic invention. Atalanta in Calydon is a drama in classical Greek form, with choruses that reveal Swinburne's mastery of melodious verse. His poems are opulent hymns to sensual love in all its aspects, to the loss of love, and to death.

Together, the works in this unique volume demonstrate Swinburne's mastery of form and the rich complexity of his poetry. This edition contains a preface, a commentary on the poems and two appendices, including a map of the places mentioned in Atalanta in Calydon. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

poems & Ballads and more!
Thhis is the best book of Pre-Raph poetry, art and history that I have ever seen/read. I cannot believe that only 2 people have read and writtewn reviews about it. I am an artist, and the artwork, etc. in this text (art school textbook for me) is extremely emotive and inspirational!

It is expensive, but it is worth every red cent to an art and poetry lover!!! Give it a chance.

THE MESSY GLORY OF SWINBURNE'S POETRY
If you are like the mass of humanity you probably don't know Algernon Swinburne or his poems. It is a shame that so few do. If you'll forgive my presumptuousness, please let me tell you why you should take the time to meet the man and his poems.
First, you should meet him because he is messy.

If you have ever read Keats (lamentably few of you have probably even done this--much less reading Swinburne) then you will know the glory of the perfectly visual, perfectly written poem.

Swinburne, for all of the beauty in his words, has none of this in his writing. If the poetry of Keats is a stunningly well tended garden then the poetry of Swinburne is a lush overgrown field of wildflowers.

Second, you should meet Swinburne because he is exhilarating.

Few poets have the courage or the skill to layer line after unforgettable line like Swinburne. The very first poem in this book: A Ballad of Life, will demonstrate what I mean.

Third, you should meet Swinburne because of the very fact that he is too little read.

He is considered to be one of the group called Pre-Raphaelite poets (his book Poems and Ballads is dedicated to his friend and Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones).

This group as a whole gets criminally overlooked. After reading works by Pre-Raphaelites like Swinburne, William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti I must say that I believe they stack up very well against their predecessors (the Romantics) and (in my opinion) eclipse successors like Yeats.

So, if you are looking for something to expand your literary horizons, or would just like something truly powerful and lovely to read, give this book by Swinburne a try.

I give it my recommendation.

Poetry Worth Reading
The early Swinburne (1860's-1880) is a very exciting poet and critic, and he has been one of my favorites for many years now.He is said to be a young man's poet, which, if certain themes in his "Poems and Ballads" be taken on a superficial level, he may well appear to be. Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads," like every book ever written,is an acknowledged classic, a masterpiece, and all of that sort of meaningless critical verbiage-- but "Poems and Ballads" really is a masterpiece in every sense of that fairly undefinable category.
If there any aspiring poets among you who are unaquainted with Swinburne, I suggest that you become acquainted with him at once-- you will almost certainly learn something from him on how powerful a well constructed, but seemingly artless poem can be. He is an absolute master of nearly every poetic form and poetic rhythm, and one of those uncommon writers of such facility that they seem to speak for you, or rather-- Swinburne manages to put into glittering poetic phrasing, thoughts and sentiments that every person feels, but only a few writers, such as Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, can both cogently and beautifully articulate.Naturally, such writers are the envy of everyone, but reading such poems of Swinburne's as "Hymn to Proserpine," "The Leper," or "A Ballad of Life," is as genuinely pleasurable as reading can possibly be.
For those of you who do not know Swinburne, I envy you your potential new discovery-- its not every day (given the popular availability of Baudelaire, Donne, et. al.) that one can turn up a writer of such calibur from nearly a century ago-- and who, until very recently, was practically forgotten.So many great poets and writers are only able to be read by English speakers in translation- we are nevertheless fortunate in our wealth of great English writers like Shakespeare, Marvell, even Emily Bronte.Swinburne is one of those writers by whom we English speakers should count ourselves fortunate to be able to read in the original language, and should avail ourselves in doing so. ... Read more

Book Description
An absorbing and lively portrait of the Victorian figurehead of rebellion and modernity, and of the world in which he lived. So good...it leaves out none of the famous anecdotes, is un-coy and explicit about sex, and gives the appearance of being written by someone who relishes the poetry but who is capable of appreciating the parodies of it. --London Observer ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Maladjusted
John Swinburne, the poet's grandfather, was his idol.He had been a friend and sympathizer of Mirabeau and John Wilkes.Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in 1837.His father was an admiral, a family man.Admiral Swinburne subsidized his son's literary career.

At Eton the poet had shaped his obsessions and enthusiasms.The Victorian public school system was characteristically brutal, vicious. Swinburne was an oddity and a recluse.By age thirteen, reading on his own, he knew the plays of Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Massinger.In 1856 he entered Balliol College.Mid-Victorian Oxford had romantic charm.The Pre-Raphaelites discovered Oxford.

Benjamin Jowett claimed that Swinburne's essays were all language and no thought.Jowett taught the poet habits of work, (salvation by work).The fatal flaw of Swinburne's genius was that he lacked impetus, inspiration, notwithstanding his learning and facility.

Swinburne's POEMS AND BALLADS was brought out in 1866.He saw Byron's career as a mirror of his own.ATALANTA IN CALYDONwas issued in 1865.It was dedicated to William Savage Landor.

As early as 1863 Swinburne suffered from fits.Swinburne was a figure head of an artistic movement, Art for Art's Sake.He received warnings about his conduct and the content of his writings from Browning and Ruskin.Jowett turned his Master's lodging into an intellectual salon.In the early 1870's he acted as Swinburne's external conscience.Swinburne's style of living exceeded his parents' ability to pay for it.

By 1879 Algernon's health was at its worst.Lady Swinburne and Theodore Watts-Dunton exchanged telegrams.Watts-Dunton was to act as domestic and moral nursemaid to Swinburne at The Pines located in Putney for the last thirty years of the poet's life.

This is a moderately-sized book recounting the life and times of Algernon Swinburne briskly and adequately.

Good Beginning for Studying Swinburne
I have recently come to study Swinburne's work in detail and found Thomas's biography helpful and interesting.It is a great book for those of us just coming to understand and appreciate the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne.The book reads easily, quickly and gives one a glimpse into Swinburne's world.I recommend this book for anyone wanting to begin studies on Swinburne and/or the Victorian World of writers and beyond.

A Neglected Poet
Thomas's "Swinburne" is an acceptable biography, conveying the necessary names, dates and places of ACS's life.The volume, however, is curiously thin, given the monster tomes generated in recent years onMorris, Ruskin and other members of the mid-Victorian set.In covering histerritory, one gets the impression that Thomas didn't quite know what to dowith the prurient bits of Swinburne's life, alternately dwelling on themand skipping past them.Nonetheless, students of mid-Victorian cultureshould be grateful for a thoughtful book on so shamefully neglected a poet. ... Read more

Book Description
Book focuses on the two traditions of Indian Classical Music: North Indian, or Hindustani and South Indian, or Karnatak. It is an introduction to principles, ideas, and systems of the above two traditions and is geared to the listener as well as to the performer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great resource and reference
This book is an introduction to both Hindustani and Carnatic classical music with a comparative approach that is quite explanatory for Western readers.Wade's explicit goal is to make the fundamental concepts of Indian music clear to a Western audience without confusing them with the terminology and classification that is standard in most similar books written by Indian authors.The book's topics include the following: the listener and relationship to the performer (with a brief overview of Indian geography and culture), notation systems and ragas (with side-by-side comparisons of Western, Hindustani, and Carnatic notation), melody instruments, meter, rhythm instruments and drumming (with very technical descriptions including the drumming syllables of both Indian traditions), performance genres of Hindustani and Carnatic traditions, and musicians and performing contexts.The book also includes an annotated bibliography, a discography and filmography, a glossary, and an index.The book is written for newcomers to Indian classical music, who may have some familiarity with the music itself, but who don't necessarily know the standard terminology.The material is well sequenced to use for an introductory study of Indian classical music.In taking a comparative approach, the book is unique and quite useful- -it's very hard to find such books written by people who are conversant in both Indian classical traditions. ... Read more