SOURCE: Amram, Beulah B. “Swinburne and Carducci.” Yale Review 5, no. 2 (January 1916): 365-81.

In the following essay, Amran compares the life and poetry of Carducci to that of English Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne.

The first decade of the twentieth century saw two giant branches lopped off the tree of European literature. When Algernon Charles Swinburne died in 1909 at the age of seventy-two, England lost the last of her great Victorian poets. When Giosuè Carducci died in 1907 at the age of seventy-one, Italy lost her one incontestably great poet, her greatest literary figure since Leopardi. There is much interesting comparison to be drawn between these two representative geniuses of two closely related literatures.

In Swinburne and Carducci we have two supremely great poets of almost coterminous lives: the first a profound student of classical, continental, and English literatures, who used a magnificent but overloaded style as the medium for brilliant...