The poet does not tell us which poems were fanciful and which were not. He does let us know that some of the poems were the record of his own experience. I propose to show that many of the poet's best known poems had a personal background and thus to differ with the theory usually prevalent that Swinburne, instead of having sung his own soul, was but a clever manipulator of rhyme and metre. The clue to the investigation is furnished by our knowledge that one of his greatest poems in the _Poems and Ballads_, "The Triumph of Time," was inspired by the one love disappointment of his life. It was written in 1862 when he was twenty-five years old and "represented with the exactest fidelity," says Gosse, his biographer, "his emotions which passed through his mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but the infinite pity and the pain." Swinburne met the young lady at the home of the friends of Ruskin and Burne-Jones, Dr. John Simon and his wife. She was a kinswoman of theirs. She gave the poet roses and sang for him. She laughed in his face when he proposed. He was hurt grievously and went up to the sea in Northumberland and composed the poem. The poet told Gosse the story in 1876. The poem is a cry of a wounded heart; one of the most powerful in all literature. The poet recounts all his emotions and foresees that this affair will influence his life. Many lines in it are familiar to Swinburne lovers, such as "I shall never be friend again with roses," "I shall hate sweet music my whole life long." It is one of Swinburne's masterpieces and Rupert Brooke considered it the masterpiece of the poet. One may now see that the terrible declamation against love, one of the lengthiest and best choruses in his play _Atlanta in Calydon_, rings with a personal note. The lines beginning "For an evil blossom was born" constitute one of the most bitter outcries against love in literature. Unconsciously, memories of his lost love were at work and the chorus must have been written about the same time as "The Triumph of Time." The play itself was published in 1864. Swinburne is the Chorus and thus chants his own feelings in the Greek legend he tells.