A Choice of Swinburne's Verse

Swinburne s reputation as an empty vessel making a lot of meaningless if musical noise relates to only about nine- tenths of his poetic production. The other tenth is worth salvaging. The difficulty of the operation lies in the fact that it is not, as it were, a constant tenth. Each reader will have his own necessary Swinburne which, if he would begin to understand the man s peculiar contribution to English verse, he should discover. That is what I have tried to do in assembling this volume of selections. My starting-point, apart from personal taste, lay in some observations of T. S. Eliot