Our Lady of Pain: Poems of Eros and Perversion

Swinburne was born in 1837 in London and spent his childhood on the Isle of Wight and in Northumberland. He attended Eton and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he became friends with the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones. Atalanta in Calydon was released in 1865 to considerable acclaim, but the following year his Poems and Ballads generated a firestorm of critical and public controversy on account of their licentiousness and anti-theism. His publisher withdrew the book with...