‘Perhaps, if truth were told, we have had a little too much of the Body,’ writes Robert Buchanan in The Fleshly School of Poetry (1872), decrying the ‘fleshliness’ of poetry from D.G. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites (85). ‘I have no earthly objection to the Body and the Flesh in their rightful time and place, as part of great work and novel art,’ he demurs. ‘But Flesh, merely as the Flesh, is too much for me … I do not admire its absurd manner of considering itself the Soul’ (86–87). Here, Buchanan conveys a Victorian anxiety about the shifting boundary lines between body and soul in his insistence that the two are distinct and ought to remain so. Yet the bulk of his extended pamphlet on ‘fleshly’ poetry uses medical rhetoric that equates poetry and nation with body. He claims that ‘the seat of the cancer’ that is ‘fleshliness’ lies ‘in the Bohemian fringe of society’ and requires a ‘physician’—presumably himself—to ‘come to put his finger in the true seat of the sore’ (7). He then traces the history of fleshly disease in English poetry, calling it ‘the Italian disease’ (14), which was imported through ‘the miasmic cloud’ of ‘What was absurd and unnatural in Dante, mingling with foul exhalations from the brains of his brother poets’ (11), and which attacked English poets until ‘the epidemic seemed to culminate’ in Cowley and others who ‘suffered and died, more or less under the fatal influence’ (13). He lists other past diseased schools of English poetry, such as the Della Cruscan and the Spasmodic, noting that they all ‘over-exert themselves and end in phthisis’ (15); but he accuses ‘the Fleshly school of verse-writers’ of now ‘diligently spreading the seeds of the disease’ (33).

It was reading Buchanan's pamphlet that first set me on the path of questioning how narrative form related to the physical body. I wanted to know what allowed Buchanan to collapse body and text so thoroughly that he could consider poetic form susceptible to disease and why the pamphlet so closely equated anxiety about literature's instability to anxiety about the body's instability. Above all, I asked, what might Victorian literary form reveal about how corporeality, especially deviant corporeality, was understood?