When Swinburne published his Poems and Ballads, First Series in 1866, he was harshly attacked by almost every reviewer for its alleged "morbidity," "uncleanness," "despair," and "libidinousness" expressed in his poems. And the arrangement of the poems in the book seems very disorderly and confusingly at random. Swinburne, however, says that "every part 〔of the book〕 has been as carefully considered and arranged as he could manage." In spite of its seeming promiscuity and disorder, the book has three consistent topics: Eros, Death, and Art. The opening two ballads, namely, 'A Ballad of Life' and 'A Ballad of Death', are important, because they introduce symbolically the three main topics of the whole volume. In 'A Ballad of Life,' the narrator is attracted to a violently erotic sensuality of Lucrezia Borgia, who is the archetypical femme fatale in the mythical world of Poems and Ballads. In 'A Ballad of Death,' he longs for Death who has taken Borgia away to the underworld, but he finally tells the ballad 〔i.e. Art〕 not to die but to live. And the eight poems that follow are all about the topics mentioned above, told severally in quite different situations: 'Laus Veneris' and 'Phaedra' are both about Eros; 'The Triumph of Time' and 'Les Noyades' are about "Liebestot" (Love-Death) ; 'A Leave-Taking' and 'Itylus' are about Art; 'Anactoria' is about Eros; 'Hymn to Proserpine' is about Death. Among the poems that succeed them, the three poems placed in the middle of the volume, namely, 'Dolores,' 'The Garden of Proserpine' and 'Hesperia' are very important, since they represent Eros, Death and Art, respectively, in a mythical way. Among the three main topics, Swinburne's greatest concern as poet is about Art. In his critical essay, William Blake, which Swinburne was writing while composing some poems that were to be included in Poems and Ballads, he definitely states the tenet of "art for art's sake." In fact, Swinburne is the　first in England to declare "art for art's sake," in which he asserts "the poet's right to treat any subject" for the cause of art. In Poems and Ballads Swinburne puts the principle of "art for art's sake" into practice by writing the shocking poems as the advocator of the principle. It is possible that Swinburne has learned from Blake a methodology of mythmaking, which he uses in creating his own passionate monodramatic world in Poems and Ballads.