SOURCE: "The Putney Period: Solipsism without Fear," in Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking, University Press of Virginia, 1978, pp. 187-214.

In the following essay, Riede urges a reassessment of Swinburne's later verse.

The enormous bulk of the poetry written in the last thirty years of Swinburne's life has been greeted with almost unmitigated disdain by the few readers who have gone to the trouble of looking at it. Swinburne, it is routinely said, devoted more than half of his creative life to the production of fatuous effusions of baby worship, political poems savoring of the rankest kind of imperialism, and nature poetry of the travel-book variety. The charges have been made so persistently that they must be met head-on, and, indeed, there is a certain amount of truth in them. The nature poetry, which makes up the bulk of the late verse and is of a far higher...