Skip to content

Due to staff leave and the Easter Bank Holiday weekend there may be some delay to orders and email responses until Tues 2nd April. Thank you for your patience!

Our Lady of Pain by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Regular price £10.95

Unit price per 

only 0 left in stock

Swinburne's first collection, Poems and Ballads (1866), generated a storm of critical and public controversy, being attacked for licentiousness and anti-theism. His publisher withdrew the book within days of publication, and the author was forced to transfer his works to another house. The present selection of Swinburne’s verse focuses precisely on what the first reviewers of the 1866 book found most objectionable: erotic passion, in both its ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ varieties. The anonymous review for the London Review called the poems ‘depraved and morbid in the last degree’; Robert Buchanan in the Athenaeum pronounced Swinburne ‘unclean for the sake of uncleanness’; and John Morley, in the most thorough and eloquent of the attacks (in the Saturday Review), called the poems ‘nameless shameless abominations’, Swinburne’s ‘a mind all aflame with the feverish carnality of a schoolboy over the dirtiest passages in Lemprière’, and Swinburne himself ‘the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs’. Contemporary readers are less likely to condemn a poet for hinting at or even outrightly depicting sex, but Swinburne’s treatment of physical passion, and the varieties of passion about which he chose to write, retain the power to shock. 

MEMBERS ENJOY 25% OFF ALL POETRY BOOKS

JOIN NOW

Join the Poetry Book Society for 25% off all books

Close (esc)

Popup

Use this popup to embed a mailing list sign up form. Alternatively use it as a simple call to action with a link to a product or a page.

Age verification

By clicking enter you are verifying that you are old enough to consume alcohol.

Search

Your cart is currently empty.
Shop now