SOURCE: "Swinburne in Miniature: A Century of Roundels," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 23, No. 3, Autumn, 1985, pp. 249-65.

In the following essay, Rooksby offers a close reading of Swinburne's roundel poems, and discusses the major themes of these works.

Swinburne, said T. S. Eliot in 1920, was among that group of poets whose work ought to be read in selection, not whole. That judgment seems to remain a sound one, despite the recent work of critics like David G. Riede [in Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking, 1978] who has referred to the "embarrassment of riches" to be found in the thirty years of Swinburne's writing in Putney; one cannot accept, though, Eliot's view that a selection would be based pretty much on Atalanta in Calydon and Poems and Ballads (1866). There are poems written after 1878, the great watershed year of Swinburne's publishing, which it would be an error to omit. Criticism has...