Ford, John - Algernon Charles Swinburne (essay date 1875)

Algernon Charles Swinburne (essay date 1875)

SOURCE: Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “John Ford.” In The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Vol. XII, edited by Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, pp. 371-406. London: William Heinemann, 1926.

[In the following essay, originally published in Essays and Studies in 1875, Swinburne recognizes Ford's distinctive dramatic style and characterizes him as a poet worth remembering.]

Whenever the name of the poet Ford comes back to us, it comes back splendid with the light of another man's genius. The fiery panegyric of Charles Lamb is as an aureole behind it. That high-pitched note of critical and spiritual enthusiasm exalts even to disturbance our own sense of admiration; possibly, too, even to some after injustice of reaction in the rebound of mind. Certainly, on the one hand, we see that the spirit of the critic has been kindled to excess by contact and apprehension of the...

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