French symbolist poetry influences the Poems and…

French symbolist poetry influences the Poems and Ballads of the English Decadent Algernon Charles Swinburne and the experimental poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Swinburne, born at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, on April 5, 1837, was the eldest of six children born to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham.

He had grown up at East Dene in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight and had attended Eton College 1849–53, where he first started writing poetry, and then Balliol College, Oxford 1856–60 with a brief hiatus when he was rusticated from the university in 1859 for having publicly supported the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini, returning in May 1860, though he never receives a degree.

He had spent summer holidays at Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, the house of his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet (1762–1860) who had a famous library and was President of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Swinburne had considered Northumberland to be his native county, an emotion memorably reflected in poems like the intensely patriotic 'Northumberland', 'Grace Darling' and others.

He enjoyed riding his pony across the moors (he was a daring horseman) 'through honeyed leagues of the northland border'.

He never called it the Scottish border.

In the years 1857–60, Swinburne had become one of Lady Pauline Trevelyan's intellectual circle at Wallington Hall and after his grandfather's death in 1860, would stay with William Bell Scott in Newcastle.

In December 1862, Swinburne had accompanied Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on a trip to Tynemouth.

Scott writes in his memoirs that as they walked by the sea, Swinburne had declaimed the as yet unpublished 'Hymn to Proserpine' and 'Laus Veneris' in his lilting intonation, while the waves 'were running the whole length of the long level sands towards Cullercoats and sounding like far-off acclamations'.

At Oxford, Swinburne had met several Pre-Raphaelites, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

He had also met William Morris.

After leaving college, he lived in London and started an active writing career, where Rossetti had been delighted with his 'little Northumbrian friend’.

Poems and Ballads causes a sensation when it is first published, especially the poems written in homage of Sappho of Lesbos such as "Anactoria" and "Sapphics": Moxon and Co. transfers its publication rights to John Camden Hotten.

Other poems in this volume such as "The Leper," "Laus Veneris," and "St Dorothy" evoke a Victorian fascination with the Middle Ages, and are explicitly medieval in style, tone and construction.

Also featured in this volume are "Hymn to Proserpine", "The Triumph of Time" and "Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)".