Nervous Energy

I'm teaching a text today that I don't know well. This always happens in the survey as the semester moves on. I wonder if my life would be different if I were, say, and eighteenth-century specialist who taught the first half of the survey: in that case we'd be moving all semester into material I would become more and more comfortable with. Because I'm at the "beginning part" of the "second half" of the survey I quickly crescendo to my favorite and best-understood material... and then find myself in the midst of modernism. We're not there yet, so I don't have to freak, really. But why did I put Swinburne on the syllabus?