Iain,
I can accept that Swinburne could be your "favorite poet in the language". Perhaps you mean this the way I can say on certain days, "Richard Strauss is my favorite composer" while knowing, feeling, that Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Ligeti, not to mention Monteverdi, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner and many others are greater. If you mean anything more than this I worry for you and your poetry. I mean all this affectionately, half-jokingly, and please read my fond post above. But Swinburne does seem a dangerous influence. You say some other provocative things. It can be useful to consider Yeats, great poet that he is, overrated. Yvor Winters is brilliant, and brilliantly funny, on him and his charges must be answered. But I think Christina Rossetti is far and away the stronger poet in her family. And while you can read a handful of Yeats, that's about the amount of Pound, maybe a quarter-pound, I can read. And I'm not disturbed by his bigotries, as I'm certain he started going frankly mad quite early. Just some thoughts.
Best,
Michael Slipp
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