Reading Algernon Charles Swinburne often feels less like reading poetry and more like being submerged into hypnotic waves of sound, sensuality and decay. His poems are overflowing with musical language, repetition and strange erotic melancholy that sometimes almost dissolves meaning itself.
Unlike colder and more intellectual poets, Swinburne writes with feverish intensity, creating atmosphere of exhaustion, beauty and self-destruction. There is something decadent in his work that later influenced not only symbolists and decadents but also modern dark aesthetics.
His poem “The Garden Of Proserpine” perhaps best captures this mood, presenting sleep, death and oblivion not as horror but as seductive release from suffering and noise of existence.
At his worst, Swinburne can become excessive and overwrought, drowning in his own verbal music, but at his best he achieves haunting rhythm unlike almost any other english poet of the nineteenth century.
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