ABSTRACT
Robert Buchanan, who, soon after their publication, was identified by Swinburne and his friends as the author of the following verses, inserted ‘August, 1866’ as the month in which Poems and Ballads appeared. The epigraph from Catullus (in F.W.Cornish’s translation, ‘Great gods, what an eloquent manikin!’) strikes a satirical note anticipating ‘the only event of the evening’. The verses were widely reprinted. Some assumed that they portrayed, not Swinburne’s part in a literary sensation, but an actual drunken Swinburne. In choosing his title, Buchanan may have remembered that Sir John Suckling had used the title ‘A Session of the Poets’.
