Fleshly School


The Fleshly School is the name given by Robert Buchanan to a realistic, sensual
school of poets, to which Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne belong. He accused them of immorality in an article entitled "The Fleshly School of Poetry" in The Contemporary Review in October 1871. This article was expanded into a pamphlet, but he subsequently withdrew from the criticisms it contained, and it is chiefly remembered by the replies it evoked from Rossetti in a letter to the Athenaeum, entitled The Stealthy School of Criticism, and from Swinburne in Under the Microscope.