ABSTRACT
No matter what they are dealing with, these poets always ‘go behind’ the first, simple, obvious, natural thought and expression of thought.
He offers an anecdote about an undergraduate friend of his who had argued scornfully that Swinburne first wrote his line ‘Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran’, the other way round and then just turned it about ‘to make fools like you admire’. Saintsbury argues that this was a general method in the short time of the flourishing of the metaphysical poets.
