Selected Poems - A.C. Swinburne

Some artists are best compared to birds: they create their art instinctively, almost - or even entirely - without conscious will and intellectual effort. In music, Mozart is probably the most prominent of these avian analogs; in poetry, Swinburne probably is. Tennyson called him a “reed through which all things blow into music”, and although that is unfair it does not fall so very far wide or short of the mark. Nor, in probably the best essay ever written on his work, does A.E. Housman's crude and bathetic comparison of him to a “sausage machine”. Swinburne's poetry CAN be called facile. Or fluent. It flows sweetly and smoothly ...