ABSTRACT
Selecting Swinburne is, more than with most poets, a judgment about the kind of poet an editor sees him to be, and what view the editor takes about the value and shape of Swinburne’s artistic career. As Bonamy Dobrée wrote in 1961, “no selection of Swinburne can be satisfactory to everybody, nor indeed to anybody familiar with his work, least of all, possibly, to him who selects” (14). Many questions have faced editors of Swinburne’s poetry since 1887, when the first volume of selected poems appeared. Today, some issues at least no longer complicate matters. The morality of publishing Swinburne is generally no longer a live issue, and, in contrast to other poets, Swinburne did not revise his poems after publication. The issue of length, however, does arise, for many of his significant and famous poems are hundreds of lines long. Any editor must also take into account full-length works such as Atalanta in Calydon, Erechtheus, Tristram of Lyonesse, and The Tale of Balen, which have a claim to be represented in a selected poems, if only by extracts.
