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Selected Verse

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Edited by Alex Wong

Selected Verse
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Categories: 19th Century, British
Imprint: Fyfield Books
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (384 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2015)
9781784100414
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eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2015)
9781784100421
£14.99 £13.49
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  • Description
  • Editor
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was one of English poetry’s truly distinctive stylists. Next to Tennyson and Browning, he was one of the major poets of the Victorian era; and he was almost certainly the most provocative. In this new selection, Swinburne’s first major collection, the Poems and Ballads of 1866, is represented much more fully than in earlier selections, and ample extracts are given from his later masterpiece, the Arthurian epic Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). This edition also includes generous passages from the best of Swinburne’s five-act tragedies, Chastelard and Bothwell, which have not been reprinted for nearly a century. Above all, the book aims to make Swinburne once again a poet to be read for pleasure.
    Alex Wong
    Alex Wong was born in 1988 in London, where for the most part he was schooled, though he spent much of his childhood in O’ahu, Hawai’i. He studied and now teaches English literature at the University of Cambridge. Poems Without Irony, his first collection of poetry, was published by Carcanet ... read more
    Awards won by Alex Wong Short-listed, 2017 Roehampton Poetry Prize Short-listed, 2017 The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize (Poems Without Irony)
    Praise for Alex Wong 'He loves words and their enticing shape-changing propensities; he loves accuracy of definition and has a consuming distaste for slovenliness.'
    Peter Scupham
    'Wong's introduction is enormously stimulating and suggestive, elegantly written, and thoughtfully organized and it takes the reader to the shore of the vast sea of Pater's work anthologized in the main body of the text... this is a portable Pater that provides enough stimulus, raw text, and admirable, thoughtful annotation to act as an outstanding guide to a great writer.'

    J. B. Bullen, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism

    'Alex Wong's intelligent selection for Carcanet includes the obligatory essays on Leonardo (1869), Botticelli (1870) and Giorgione (1877), as well as the notorious conclusion to The Renaissance (1873) ... Wong's succinct notes cover an impressive range and his selection for Carcanet is an excellent starting point for the first-time reader.'

    Elizabeth Prettejohn, London Review of Books

      'Eloquently synopsizes the major arguments regarding certain hallmarks of Pater's critical stance and aestheticist worldview... A welcome occurrence and worthy of notice and commendation... There is much that will reward the reader intrepid enough to follow both the main roads and the byways of Pater's thought'

    Meghan Freeman, English Literature in Translation 
    'Possesses brilliant linguistic finesse'
    David Morley
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