Selected Poems - Algernon Charles Swinburne

Queen Victoria said, 'I am told that Mr Swinburne is the best poet in my dominions,' but his work nevertheless fell into critical neglect after the First World War.The eccentricities of his character and a few anthology pieces were remembered but his novels, criticism, letters - and especially - his poems and verse translations were left to gather dust.

In recent years his work has found advocates all over the world and the poetry of our century will be more intelligible to readers familiar with Swinburne's approach to words and meanings.Thomas Hardy and Ezra Pound are just two of the major poets who fell under the spell of his music.As Johnathan Raban wrote, Swinburne had a dazzling facility for delivering words at speed'; he was 'the besotted logophile.No one invested more of his life in words...' Swinburne's enthusiasms, which are based mainly in the Elizabethan period, are broad and sometimes contradictory; he loved Landor and Whitman, Jonson and Blake, Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade.His poems are radical in many ways and his inclusiveness is refreshing.

This selection draws on the full range of Swinburne's poetry and includes comprehensive notes and an introduction.