Ode on the Insurrection in Candia

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was a British poet, writer and playwright of the Victorian era. Active in the aesthetic circle, romantic and then decadent, he met Oscar Wilde and other famous intellectuals and artists of the same environment, attending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and becoming a friend of the poet, artist and initiate Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Eccentric personality, with a strong taste for artistic provocation, inspired by writers such as the Marquis de Sade, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charles Baudelaire, his poetry was very controversial, due to its themes (sadomasochism, suicide, lesbianism, irreligiosity); his lyrics are also characterized by original versification solutions, by the cult of paganism and the idealized Middle Ages, and of absolute freedom. From 1903 to 1909 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. With Alfred Edward Housman, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Ernest Dowson and William Butler Yeats, he is considered one of the most representative lyric poets of Victorian literature. He died in Putney (London) on April 10, 1909.

Swinburne’s literary output is vast and includes poems, plays, songs, novels, short stories and essays on literary criticism.

The poem Ode on the Insurrection in Candia, was written by Algernon Charles Swinburne in January 1867 and published for the first time two months later in The Fortnightly Review. Was then included by the poet in 1871 in his book Songs before Sunrise, dedicated to the Italian revolutionary and Freemason Giuseppe Mazzini.

Candia is the historical Venetian name of the island of Crete and of the city of Heraklion. The name dates back to the time when the island was a colony of Venice. The Realm or Kingdom of Candia or Duchy of Candia in fact was the official name of Crete during the island’s period as an overseas colony of the Republic of Venice, from the initial Venetian conquest in 1205-1212 to its fall to the Ottoman Empire during the Cretan War (1645-1669). Swinburn’s poem is dedicated to the Cretan revolt, which had not yet ended when he wrote it. The Cretan revolt of 1866-1869 (in Greek Κρητική Επανάσταση του 1866) or Great Cretan Revolution (Μεγάλη Κρητική Επανάσταση) was a three-year uprising in Crete against Ottoman rule, the third and largest in a series of Cretan revolts between the end of the Greek War of Independence in 1830 and the establishment of the independent Cretan State in 1898.

The heroic deeds of the Cretan rioters, and in particular the event known as the Arkadi Holocaust, aroused great admiration in the poet, in keeping with his revolutionary spirit.