Swinburne's views of Keats

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

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Note 12, chapter 3, 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.

1n his now classic study, Keats and the Victorians (New Haven, l944), George Ford concludes that "in spite of ecstatic outbursts of praise on some occasions, and in spite of early imitations, Swinburne's respect for Keats's art is not very deep. His own poetry is on the periphery of the Keats tradition" (169). Most current critics of Swinburne would, however, agree more fully with Lafourcade's estimate of Keats's profound influence on Swinburne's early concerns and style (see Jeunesse, 155-56, 537-38, but also and especially his Swinburne's Hyperion and Other Poems: With an Essay on Swinburne and Keats [London, 1927] ). See also Fass, La Belle Dame, 170-75, 188-90; and Riede, Swinburne, 106-107, 114.

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Last modified June 2000

Last modified 8 June 2007