ABSTRACT
Algernon Charles Swinburne challenged the sexual taboos of Victorian literature by writing poems not only about heterosexual love but lesbianism, hermaphroditism, necrophilia and sado-masochism. Despite Swinburne’s inability to escape from the shadow of the Church, typified in his retention of the concept of ‘sin’, it challenged Victorian culture’s repressive attitudes to the body, to sex, to the value of sensual life, and struck a blow for artistic expression. Meanwhile Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to Alfred Tennyson on 6 October that he had heard the Laureate had been ‘speaking of the qualities which displease people in Swinburne’s poetry’ and that they might partly be due to the poet’s friendship with the painter. William Michael Rossetti’s Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads was published in November 1866, a judicious mixture of criticism, explanation and praise. William Rossetti corrected the text, persuading Swinburne to make changes, and sending a proof to Hotten on 4 October.
