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; they contain dramatic monologues dwelling on, among other things, sadomasochism, lesbian longing ,and necrophiliac desire. 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 Much work remains unpublished.
Swinburne on the Victorian Web
Aesthetes and Decadents on the Victorian Web
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