SOURCE: An introduction to Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Boydell Press, 1990, pp. 1-9.

In the following essay, Carley discusses the defining characteristics of Swinburne's Arthurian poems.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was one of the large group of poets and artists who fell under the spell of the Arthurian legend in the mid nineteenth century. As he would later explain in Under the Microscope (1872)

The story as it stood of old had in it something almost of Hellenic dignity and significance; in it as in the great Greek legends we could trace from a seemingly small root of evil the birth and growth of a calamitous fate, not sent by mere malevolence of heaven, yet in its awful weight and mystery of darkness apparently out of all due retributive proportion to the careless sin or folly of presumptuous weakness which first incurred its infliction; so that by mere hasty resistance...