Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I, for one, am glad to read what Michael Robbins wrote about Swinburne in “Mimic Motion” [February 2013]. Not that I entirely agree with him. Robbins’s point of view is for the most part received and run of the mill. It reveals nothing new: the s&m, the windy 
impressionistic style, and, finally, Eliot’s perceptive yet strategic condescension. The only thing really new is that someone is writing about Swinburne at all!

It is little known today that Swinburne was also a prolific critic as well as a major poet. He rescued Blake from obscurity and was a forerunner to the so-called new critics. He pioneered textual analysis and wrote numerous entries for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Swinburne was, indeed, a very interesting and tenacious character. I see him more like the badger in the John Clare poem, his brain fully intact. It is as easy to bait a dead Swinburne as a dead badger. But alive both are formidable. For all Robbins’s cleverly connecting Stevens and Swinburne, we are left with the same estimate that Laura Kasischke offered up for Stevens: a couple of poems pronounced as perfect or beautiful. Swinburne detested mental pygmies. I wonder how he would have reviewed Robbins.