Algernon charles swinburne

1837-1909

Swinburne came from a distinguished family and attended Eton and Oxford, but sought the company of the bohemians of Paris and of London where he became temporarily associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites. By 1879 his dissipations had profoundly affected his frail physique, and he was obliged to put himself into the protective custody of a friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton, who removed him to the countryside and kept him alive although sobered and tamed.

Swinburne continued to write voluminously and sometimes memorably, as in his fine late poem The Lake of Gaube, but most of his best poetry is in his early 'publications. His early play Atalanta in Calydon (1865) was described by Swinburne himself as "pure Greek," and his command of classical allusions here, as well as in other poems, is indeed impressive.

IN his play and in the volume that followed it, Poems and Ballads (1866), Swinburne demonstrated a metrical virtuosity that dazzled his early readers and is still dazzling.

LEWIS CARROLL 1832-1898

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a deacon in the Anglican Church and a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford as well as a pioneer in the art of portrait photography. Most of his publications were mathematical treatises but his fame rests on the strange pair books he wrote for children: Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Class (1871), both published under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. Like Gulliver's Travels, these narratives have long been enjoyed, at different levels, by both children and adults. The various songs scattered through the stories are sometimes parodies, as, for example, The White Knight's Song, but more often they are classic examples of nonsense verse. Poems such as Jabberwocky exhibit a mathematician's fondness for puzzles combined with a literary person's fondness for word games.