W. B. Yeats.
I like your verses on Murias and like them the better perhaps because of the curious coincidence that I did in summer verses about lovers wandering ‘in long forgotten Murias.’
During the spring William Sharp had prepared a volume of selections from the poems of Swinburne, with an Introduction by himself, for publication in the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors. Mr. Swinburne consented that the selection should be made in accordance with the critical taste of the Editor, with which however he was not in complete agreement. He expressed his views in a letter dated from The Pines, Putney Hill:
Oct. 6th.
Dear Mr. Sharp,
Many thanks for the early copy you have had the kindness to send on to me. I am pleased to find the Nympholept in a leading place, as I think it one of the best and most representative things I ever did. I should have preferred on all accounts that In the Bay had filled the place you have allotted to Ave atque Vale, a poem to which you are altogether too kind, in my opinion, as others have been before you. I never had really much in common with Baudelaire tho’ I retain all my early admiration for his genius at its best. I wish there were fewer of such very juvenile crudities as you have selected from my first volume of poems: it is trying to find such boyish attempts as The Sundew, Aholibah, Madonna Mia, etc., offered as examples of the work of a man who has written so many volumes since in which there is nothing that is not at least better and riper than they. I wish too that Mater Triumphalis had not been separated from its fellow poem—a much fitter piece of work to stand by itself. On the other hand, I am very cordially obliged to you for giving the detached extract from Anactoria. I should greatly have preferred that extracts only should have been given from Atalanta in Calydon, which sorely needs compression in the earlier parts. Erectheus, which would have taken up so much less space, would also, I venture to think, have been a better and a fairer example of the author’s work. Mr. Watts Dunton’s objections to the book is the omission of Super Flumina Babylonis. I too am much surprised to find it excluded from a selection which includes so much that might well be spared—nay, would be better away. I would like to have seen one of what I call my topographical poems in full. The tiny scrap from Loch Torridon was hardly worth giving by itself. I do not understand what you find obscure or melancholy in The Garden of Cymodoce. It was written simply to express my constant delight in the recollection of Sark. I hope you will not think anything in this note captious or ungracious. Candour always seems to be the best expression possible of gratitude or goodwill.
Ever sincerely yours,
A. Swinburne.
In December of 1901 F. M. wrote, ostensibly from Argyll, to Dr. Goodchild: “I had hoped by this time to have had some definite knowledge of what I am to do, where to go this winter. But circumstances keep me here.... Our friend, too (meaning himself as W. S.), is kept to England by the illness of others. My plans though turning upon different issues are to a great extent dependent, later, on his....
I have much to do, and still more to think of, and it may be bring to life through the mysterious resurrection of the imagination.