Swinburne is a poet not of natural objects but of natural energies – of winds and surging waters. His scale is macrocosmic, his focus less upon the small celandine than upon the spines of mountains, less upon things seen than upon forces felt. At times he is nearly a blind poet, all tongue and ear and touch. His poetry moves away from the art of painting and, in Pater's phrase, aspires to the condition of music; after reading Swinburne one retains not an image but a tonality and a rhythm.

Traditionally, the English poet has prided himself on particularity, which the New Critics exalted as the clearest sign of genius. Donne's ‘bracelet of bright haire about the bone’ has dazzled readers for nearly a century. Our very conception of poetry has been shaped by the practices of the metaphysical poets and by Keats's dictum that the poet must have ‘distinctness for his luxury.’ We are at a loss in reading a poet who, like Swinburne, is diffuse not by default but by design.

From the perspective of Keats's principles, Gerard Manley Hopkins is in the mainstream of nineteenth-century verse and Swinburne is the eccentric. For Hopkins's attempt to etch in words the dappled individuality of things was as much a cultural as a personal preoccupation.