ABSTRACT
Robert Buchanan, ‘Walt Whitman’, an appendix to The Fleshly School of Poetry(1872).
Robert Williams Buchanan (1841–1901), British poet, novelist, dramatist and critic, was the son of Robert Buchanan (1813–66), an Owenite lecturer and journalist. He wrote many successful plays and is the author of a long series of novels. The article on ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ was contributed under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland to the Contemporary Review of October 1871. It evoked replies from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and from Swinburne (in Under The Microscope) to whom the Appendix reprinted here is, in its turn, an answer. Swinburne had objected that itwas inconsistent for Buchanan to object to the sensuality of English poets like himself while accepting the same qualityin Whitman.
