Swinburne's Influence on Pater

Anthony H. Harrison, Professor of English, North Carolina State University

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Note 2 to the Epilogue in the author's Swinburne's Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry which Louisiana State University Press published in 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

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Preparing to review The Renaissance for the Fortnightly Review, which he edited, John Morley apparently wrote to ask Swinburne his opinion of Pater's work. On April 11, Swinburne responded: "I admire and enjoy Pater's work so heartily that I am somewhat shy of saying how much, ever since on my telling him once at Oxford how highly Rossetti (D.G.) as well as myself estimated his first papers in the Fortnightly, he replied to the effect that he considered them as owing their inspiration entirely to my own work in the same line" (Letters, II, 240-41>.

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Last modified June 2000

Last modified 8 June 2007