Arthurian and Grail Poetry Algernon Charles Swinburne
(1837-1909) Algernon Charles Swinburne was born April 5, 1837 in
Grosvenor Place, London, the son of Admiral Sir John Swinburne;
but spent most of his boyhood on the Isle of Wight. With Shelley
and Byron, he is one of the very few poets since the days of
Raleigh and Sidney to come from the aristocracy. He had a very
orthodox upper-class education, attending Eton and then Oxford.
Influenced by the poetry of Shelley and possessed of the common
student leanings toward political radicalism, Swinburne became
known, along with James Thompson, as a kind of Poet Laureate of
atheism. At Oxford, he met nearly everyone who would influence
his later life, including Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones, who
in 1857 were painting their Arthurian murals on the walls of the
Oxford Union. Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol College and
translator of Plato, recognized his poetic talent and tried to
keep him from being expelled for his radical leanings and
atheism with the s