A critical re-evaluation of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry is long over-due. Hailed by his contemporaries in 1860, when he published his first volume of verse, as the “bugler” of a new age in poetry, he became the centre of a storm of controversy that continued most of his “passion and revolt,” and overcondemned by his enemies as a poet whose sole claim to fame rested on his bizarre life and the sound and fury of his words, it has been difficult to get at the essential truth of the man.