SOURCE: “Robert Buchanan and the Fleshly Controversy,” in PMLA, Vol. LXVII, No. 2, March, 1952, pp. 65-93.

In the following essay, Cassidy discusses Buchanan's role in the Fleshly Controversy—a literary conflict ignited when Buchanan published a scathing assessment of the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

In the long history of literary polemics none has been more savage or more far-reaching in its consequences than the Fleshly Controversy, which raged in Victorian England during the 1870's with Robert Buchanan on one side and Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, and the unfortunate Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the other. The literary importance of the latter three and the intensive study devoted to their careers have thrown a revealing light upon their activities in the Controversy. Robert Buchanan has fared quite differently. Although widely heralded in the 1860's and '70's as a young poet of promise, he subsequently suffered such a literary eclipse...