Algernon Charles Swinburne (April 5 1837, - 1909) was an English poet and critic. He is considered a decadent poet, albeit that he professed to perhaps rather more vice than he actually indulged in, a fact which Oscar Wilde notably and acerbically commented upon.

Many of his poems evoke the Victorian fascination with the mediaeval period, and some of them are explicitly mediaeval in style, tone and construction, these representatives notably being The Leper, Laus Veneris and St Dorothy.