'Fine writing and realism were what John Masefield was after in prose. In poetry, it was the upsurge of feeling and rhythm first released by Swinburne. Masefield wrote in a letter to me after my first meeting with him, "Swinburne meant much to my generation: he was literary, he adored the French masters, who were then our masters in all things: he was generous beyond most poets...:he was one of the real discoverers of Blake: he could write exquisite verse in an age of exquisite verse: he laid us all at his feet with half a dozen things which I cannot read without emotion now. he was one of the first romantic poets to be read by me: and Chastelard, to a boy, is all that the heart can desire and the lines on the death of Baudelaire all that genius and grief can utter".'