Tiresias

By Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was a British poet, writer and playwright of the Victorian era. Active in the aesthetic circle, romantic and then decadent, he met Oscar Wilde and other famous intellectuals and artists of the same environment, attending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and becoming a friend of the poet, artist and initiate Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Eccentric personality, with a strong taste for artistic provocation, inspired by writers such as the Marquis de Sade, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charles Baudelaire, his poetry was very controversial, due to its themes (sadomasochism, suicide, lesbianism, irreligiosity); his lyrics are also characterized by original versification solutions, by the cult of paganism and the idealized Middle Ages, and of absolute freedom. From 1903 to 1909 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. With Alfred Edward Housman, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Ernest Dowson and William Butler Yeats, he is considered one of the most representative lyric poets of Victorian literature. He died in Putney (London) on April 10, 1909.
Swinburne’s literary output is vast and includes poems, plays, songs, novels, short stories and essays on literary criticism. Tiresias, an extraordinary poem with a mythological and initiatory subject, dedicated to the great prophet and blind soothsayer of ancient Greece, was included in 1871 by Swinburne in his book Songs before Sunrise, dedicated to the Italian revolutionary and Freemason Giuseppe Mazzini.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Release date: May 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9791255043317

Book preview

SYMBOLS & MYTHS

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

TIRESIAS

LOGO EDIZIONI AURORA BOREALE

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: Tiresias

Author: Algernon Charles Swinburne

Publishing series: Symbols & Myths

Editing by Nicola Bizzi

ISBN: 979-12-5504-331-7

Cover image: Johann Heinrich Füssli, Tiresias foretells the Future to Odysseus, 1780 ca.

(Cardiff, National Museum Wales)

LOGO EDIZIONI AURORA BOREALE

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2023 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato - Italia

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INTRODUCTION BY THE PUBLISHER

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was a British poet, writer and playwright of the Victorian era.

Active in the aesthetic circle, romantic and then decadent, he met Oscar Wilde and other famous intellectuals and artists of the same environment, attending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and becoming a friend of the poet, artist and initiate Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Eccentric personality, with a strong taste for artistic provocation, inspired by writers such as the Marquis