Volume 21, Number 19 · November 28, 1974
Bring Back the Birch!
By Noel Annan
Swinburne: Portrait of a Poet
by Philip Henderson
Macmillan, 305 pp., $10.95
The Year of the Wombat: England, 1857
by Francis Watson
Harper & Row, 185 pp., $7.95
When Tennyson died, Queen Victoria said to her prime minister, who was to advise her who should be the next poet laureate: 'I am told that Mr. Swinburne is the best poet in my dominions.' Horrified, Gladstone wrote to Lord Acton, 'I have been making a careful examination of his case…. I fear he is absolutely impossible.' Since Hardy had not published and Hopkins was unknown, the Queen as usual was right; but despite the blameless life Swinburne had led for over ten years at The Pines, it would perhaps have been eccentric for the Queen to appoint a former would-be regicide and militant atheist as her bard.
Review, 7039 words
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