Swinburne as Poet by T.S. Eliot — Read

It is a question of some nicety to decide how much must be read of any / particular poet. And it is not a question merely of the size of the / poet. There are some poets whose every line has unique value. There are / others who can be taken by a few poems universally agreed upon. There / are others who need be read only in selections, but what selections are / read will not very much matter. Of Swinburne, we should like to have the / _Atalanta_ entire, and a volume of selections which should certainly / contain _The Leper_, _Laus Veneris_, and _The Triumph of Time_. It ought / to contain many more, but there is perhaps no other single poem which it / would be an error to omit. A student of Swinburne will want to read one / of the Stuart plays and dip into _Tristram of Lyonesse_. But almost no / one, to-day, will wish to read the whole of Swinburne. It is not because / Swinburne is voluminous; certain poets, equally voluminous, must be read / entire. The necessity and the difficulty of a selection are due to the / peculiar nature of Swinburne's contribution, which, it is hardly too / much to say, is of a very different kind from that of any other poet of / equal reputation.

We may take it as undisputed that Swinburne did make a contribution; / that he did something that had not been done before, and that what he / did will not turn out to be a fraud. And from that we may proceed to / inquire what Swinburne's contribution was, and why, whatever critical / solvents we employ to break down the structure of his verse, this / contribution remains. The test is this: agreed that we do not (and I / think that the present generation does not) greatly enjoy Swinburne, and / agreed that (a more serious condemnation) at one period of our lives we / did enjoy him and now no longer enjoy him; nevertheless, the words which / we use to state our grounds of dislike or indifference cannot be applied / to Swinburne as they can to bad poetry. The words of condemnation are / words which express his qualities. You may say "diffuse. " But the / diffuseness is essential; had Swinburne practised greater concentration / his verse would be, not better in the same kind, but a different thing. / His diffuseness is one of his glories. That so little material as / appears to be employed in _The Triumph of Time_ should release such an / amazing number of words, requires what there is no reason to call / anything but genius. You could not condense _The Triumph of Time_. You / could only leave out. And this would destroy the poem; though no one / stanza seems essential. Similarly, a considerable quantity-a volume of / selections-is necessary to give the quality of Swinburne although there / is perhaps no one poem essential in this selection.