Swinburne and France

This collection of essays has been specially commissioned to pay homage to a great English poet enamoured with France. Three years after the centenary of Swinburne’s death, a few French scholars mainly specializing in 19th-century poetry have decided to continue the celebration in their own way and explore the specific links between his verse and French culture. Swinburne was impressively versed in the literature and the arts of France.
The poems of Villon, Hugo, Baudelaire and Mallarmé (to name but a few) and, more generally, the ferment of ideas on this side of the Channel, mattered a lot to him and contributed to the making of his art as a poet and to his development as a thinker heralding Modernism. As to his command of French, it was really astounding. He wrote several poems in the language, as well as a seminal essay on Shelley’s The Cenci and letters to those he admired in a country which to his heart and mind was not foreign at all.
Some of these French writings are here translated for the first time into English.