Swinburne’ s output was not merely mountainous. Every year the mountain labored and brought forth another mountain, leaving the original Swinburne buried several strata below most later readers’ mining equipment. Then he got put on T. S. Eliot’s proscription list, his name directly under Milton’s; and so the only way a self-respecting self-respecter could read him was under plain covers—an ironic fate for one who was once, on quite different grounds, hidden under misleading and “inoffensive” covers.
Edith Sitwell has taken from the vast body of Swinburne’s work a small sampling, and prefaced it with an essay claiming that Swinburne was not only “a supreme technician,” but “a great tragic poet.” The approach resembles that she used in her book on Pope. At a time when Pope’s stock had fallen almost as low as Swinburne’s, she simply threw down before the reader some of those great solid lines like marble, and said, defiantly, “Tell me that’s not poetry.” No elaborate critical theory was offered. She did not think a “revival” of Pope had to wait for the invention of some new critical “gimmick.” She gambled on the good sense of mankind and she remains, even to this day, one of the few who has won that bet.
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