Swinburne is considered a decadent poet. His mastery of vocabulary, rhyme and metre arguably put him among the most talented English language poets in history, although he has also been criticized for his florid style and word choices that only fit the rhyme scheme rather than contributing to the meaning of the piece.
After the first Poems and Ballads, Swinburne's later poetry is devoted more to philosophy and politics, particularly in the volume Songs before Sunrise. He does not stop writing love poetry entirely, but the content is much less shocking.
Hazlitt, Coleridge, or Lamb, Swinburne's three Romantic predecessors, though that T.S Elliot, characterized Swinburne's prose as "the tumultuous outcry of adjectives, the headstrong rush of undisciplined sentences, are the index to the impatience and perhaps laziness of a disorderly mind.
- Mr. Swinburne … expresses in verse what he finds in books as passionately as a poet expresses what he finds in life.
By George Bernard Shaw, in the Saturday Review, July 11, 1896.
- Swinburne was perpetually talking shop: the bookish spirit in which he looked on nature and mankind, with his head full of his own trade, is essentially the same as the spirit in which The Tailor and Cutter annually criticises the portraits in the Royal Academy, interested, not in the artist, not in the subject, but in the cut of the subject's clothes.
By A. E. Housman "Swinburne", a lecture delivered at University College, London in 1910, published posthumously in the Cornhill Magazine, Autumn 1969.
- Mr. Swinburne is already the Poet Laureate of England. The fact that his appointment to this high post has not been degraded by official confirmation renders his position all the more unassailable. He whom all poets love is the Laureate Poet always.
By Oscar Wilde, in The Idler, April 1895.
- I attempt to describe Mr. Swinburne; and lo! the Bacchanal screams, the sterile Dolores sweats, serpents dance, men and women wrench, wriggle and foam in an endless alliteration of heated and meaningless words, the veriest garbage of Baudelaire flowered over with the epithets of the Della Cruscans.
By Robert Buchanan, in the Contemporary Review, October 1871.