Selected Verse

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was one of English poetry’s truly distinctive stylists. Next to Tennyson and Browning, he was one of the major poets of the Victorian era—and he was almost certainly the most provocative. In this new selection, Swinburne’s first major collection, the Poems and Ballads of 1866, is represented much more fully than in earlier selections, and ample extracts are given from his later masterpiece, the Arthurian epic Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). This edition also includes generous passages from the best of Swinburne’s five-act tragedies, Chastelard and Bothwell, which have not been reprinted for nearly a century.

A. C. Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909. Alex Wong studied English literature at the University of Cambridge, where he recently completed his doctoral research on “kissing-poems” of the Renaissance. He has published a number of essays on English and Latin poetry, as well as verse translations from Latin and Italian.