Taboo topics, such as lesbianism, cannibalism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism. His poems have many common motifs, such as the Ocean, Time, and Death.

Many critics consider his mastery of vocabulary, rhyme and metre impressive, although he has also been criticised for his florid style and word choices that only fit the rhyme scheme rather than contributing to the meaning of the piece.

Sado-masochist and alcoholic and was obsessed with the Middle Ages and lesbianism.

Poet, playwright, novelist, and critic.

Swinburne possessed an altogether unexampled command of rhyme, the chief enrichment of modern verse. The English language is comparatively poor in rhymes, and most English poets, when they have to rhyme more than two or three words together, betray their embarrassment. They betray it, for instance, when they write sonnets after the strict Petrarchian rule: the poetical inferiority of most English sonnets, if compared with what their own authors have achieved in other forms of verse, is largely though not entirely the result of this difficulty.  To Swinburne the sonnet was child’s play: the task of providing four rhymes was not hard enough, and he wrote long poems in which each stanza required eight or ten rhymes, and wrote them so that he never seemed to be saying anything for the rhyme’s sake.

Algernon Charles Swinburne  was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He was the author of several novels, and contributed the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909.Swinburne was born into an old aristocratic family.  He was sent to Eton, where he acquired a taste for flagellation, and Oxford, where he became friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, of which he was briefly a member. 

His second volume of poetry, a drama in classical style, brought him praise.  His next two volumes, Poems and Ballads (1866), were heavily influenced by de Sade, Baudelaire, and the French symbolists.

This work was reviled by critics, most famously by Robert Buchanan, who attacked Swinburne and Rossetti in "The Fleshly School of Poetry," though it influenced contemporaries like Wilde and Yeats and modernists such as Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Swinburne suffered a breakdown in the 1870s but continued to write, in genres ranging from lyric poetry and satire to pornography, for the remainder of his life.  Much of his work remains unpublished.