Algernon Charles Swinburne is justly regarded as the major Victorian poet most profoundly at odds with his age and as one of the most daring, innovative, and brilliant lyricists to ever write in English. Less justly, his reputation still depends largely on the two early volumes, Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866), with which he shocked and outraged Victorian sensibility, introducing into the pious, stolid age a world of fierce atheism, strange, powerful passions, fiery paganism, and a magnificent new lyrical voice the likes of which had never before been heard. But Swinburne must be remembered for other things as well. His radical republicanism, really a worship of the best instincts of man, pushed Victorian humanism well beyond the "respectable" limits of Matthew Arnold's writings, his critical writings on art and literature greatly influenced the aesthetic climate of his age, and his extraordinary imitative facility made him...