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 and appeared as the title of an 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, when Buchanan dedicated his novel God and the Man to him.