Part of the 'Bloomsbury Poetry Classics' series.
Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in 1836 and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. As an undergraduate he published his first poems and began an association with the poets and painters of the pre-Raphaelite movement. During his mid-twenties he shared a house in Chelsea with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and it was during this period that he wrote most of his most celebrated works. He also fell victim to various alcohol-related illnesses and earned himself some notoriety as a madcap genius. By the time he turned forty, Swinburne's drinking was thoroughly out of control and it was generally feared that he would shortly die. In 1879, though, he was taken in hand by the novelist and critic, Theodore Watts-Dunton. Swinburne moved into Watts-Dunton's home in Putney and lived there, very quietly, for thirty years. He died in 1909, aged 72.
