fleshly school of poetry

fleshly school of poetry, a group of late 19th-century English poets associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The term was invented by the Scottish author Robert Williams Buchanan (1841–1901) and appeared as the title of a pseudonymous article in the Contemporary Review (October 1871) in which he castigated the poetry of Rossetti and his colleagues, notably Algernon Swinburne, for its “. . . morbid deviation from the healthy forms of life. . . .” In Buchanan’s view, these poets exhibited “. . . weary wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane; a superfluity of extreme sensibility. . . .” Rossetti replied with “The Stealthy School of Criticism” in The Athenaeum, December 1871, and Swinburne with a pamphlet, Under the Microscope, in 1872. The controversy was prolonged and distressed Rossetti, but it had ended before Rossetti’s death in 1882. Buchanan dedicated his novel God and the Man (1881) to him. In the work of Rossetti, Swinburne, and (to a lesser extent) William Morris, Buchanan had perceived—and disliked—a frankness about sex and an absence of moral didacticism that anticipated the Decadent movement of the late 19th century.

(Read Howard Nemerov’s Britannica essay on poetry.)