ABSTRACT
In March 1865 Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon appeared in cream buckram covers with three gold roundels designed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Swinburne’s loss of religious belief and the deaths and disappointments in love he had suffered refute the notion that Atalanta is only inspired by other literature. Meleager’s love for the independent-spirited Atalanta is unhappy and unrequited. William Rutland summarized the three strands of Atalanta as ‘an overwhelming sense of the tragedy of life; a conviction that love produces only agony and ruin; and a tremendous denunciation of the all powerful malignant providence that is responsible for these things’. Atalanta’s music resounded through that world like the crash of an Atlantic roller over the tinkling of a fountain. In the spring of 1865 the Admiral decided to sell East Dene, to Swinburne’s ‘life-long sorrow’. Swinburne continued seeing Rossetti almost every day he was in London.
