ABSTRACT
A T the beginning of the seventies, Robert Buchanan was dismayed to find all Victorian England beset by the demon of the leg "cutting capers without a body or a head." Wherever he turned in London, he saw the snake Sensualism coiled in readiness to spit its venom upon him. Polite society, he believed, was so far forgetting its reticences that it would admit the impolite reality of physical passion; while art, in its turn, seemed more and more prepared to ignore the conventional respectabilities that it might cater to the depraved appetites of wanton youth or furnish models for imitation to "young gentlemen wi th animal faculties morbidly developed by too much tobacco and too little exercise." The worst literary offenders — those indeed most hostile to Buchanan's didactic sentimentalism — constituted the Fleshly School of Poetry,1 a group united by perverse loyalties against all that was sane and wholesome and normal and decently veiled from public view. And the grossest offender among the
fleshly poets, even more debased than the infamous Swinburne, was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "a fleshly person, wi th nothing particular to tell us or teach us," a man "fleshly all over, from the roots of his hair to the tip of his toes, . . . never spiritual, never tender; always selfconscious and aesthetic."
