ABSTRACT
The Spectator commented on the author’s choice of ‘two painful subjects, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Murder of Rosamond Clifford by Queen Eleanor’, judging Algernon Charles Swinburne’s language ‘painfully distorted, vague, elliptical, and bristling with harsh words’. By the spring of 1861 Swinburne had enough poems for a book and was still adding to them. When in January he wrote to thank Scott for a letter which made ‘a green and gushing spot in the dullest of lives’, Swinburne enclosed ‘A Song in Time of Revolution’. The thought of a pleasure so strong it could wipe out consciousness in an instant exposes the impulse in Swinburne to self-transcendence. His life in the early 1860s has often been caricatured as a cross between a farce and a morality play, where Gifted Innocence is led astray by the malign influence of Corrupt Age.
