Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was a British poet, writer and playwright of the Victorian era. Active in the aesthetic circle, romantic and then decadent, he met Oscar Wilde and other famous intellectuals and artists of the same environment, attending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and becoming a friend of the poet, artist and initiate Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Eccentric personality, with a strong taste for artistic provocation, inspired by writers such as De Sade, Shelley and Baudelaire, his poetry was very controversial and his lyrics were characterized by the cult of paganism and the idealized Middle Ages, and of absolute freedom. From 1903 to 1909 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. With Alfred E. Housman, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Ernest Dowson and William Butler Yeats, he is considered one of the most representative lyric poets of Victorian literature.
Swinburne’s literary output was vast and included poems, plays, novels, short stories and numerous essays on literary criticism. Among the latter we have selected, to be reproposed to the attention of modern readers, his fundamental essay on
The poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, written in 1870.