Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1903 to 1909. His tragedies include The Queen Mother, Rosamond, Chastelard, Bothwell, Mary Stuart, Locrine, The Sisters, and Marino Faliero.

Republican, pagan, a sensualist alive to pleasure and to pain, Swinburne flouted the rules of Victorian decorum and morality in his life and work He created a unique means of expression through what Tennyson called his 'wonderful rhythmic invention', and yet his verse was influenced by poets from numerous periods and countries. Many of his poems are opulent hymns to sensual love, in all its aspects, and to death and to the loss of love. Swinburne's verse is immensely diverse in form: together these two works demonstrate its rich complexity and variety. As T. S. Eliot remarked, there is no reason to call his power over words anything but genius.

This Penguin edition contains a preface, a table of dates, a commentary on the poems and two appendices, one of which is a map of the places mentioned in Atalanta in Calydon.