ABSTRACT
'i loved Atalanta, Hardy reminisced, years later. 'I used to walk from my lodgings near Hyde Park to the draughting office every morning, and never without a copy of the first edition of the Poems and Ballads sticking out of my pocket.' In 1866 Swinburne's Poems dropped like a bomb into a social order that was as unprepared for them as the red-haired poet was unprepared for the storm of censure that his book aroused. Young men were delighted. In these prosaic days of 1965, it is hard for us to visualize the effect that Swinburne's book of poetry created a hundred years ago. 'It simply swept us off our legs with rapture,' recalled one eminent critic, then an undergraduate at Oxford. At Cambridge, so Edmund Gosse reported, young men joined hands and marched along the streets shouting the words of 'Dolores' or of 'A Song in Time of Revolution'. The metaphors and similes of water, light, wind, and fire, which seemed to inspire and animate that wonderful poetry, took the whole lettered youth of England by storm with their melody and their audacity.
