ABSTRACT
‘Swinburne’s Poems’ in the Edinburgh Review (cxxxiv, 71–99) begins with unfavourable consideration of all Swinburne’s earlier volumes except Atalanta in Calydon before discussing Songs before Sunrise. It anticipated Robert Buchanan’s ‘fleshly school’ by identifying Swinburne as belonging to ‘the sensational school’ and ‘the corrupted school of French art and French poetry’. According to The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, the article was the work of Thomas Spencer Baynes. In 1864 Baynes had been elected to the chair of logic, metaphysics, and literature at the University of St. Andrews. As editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopœdia Britannica he enlisted Swinburne as a contributor, and between 1875 and 1883 the two men were occasional correspondents.
