[In the following excerpt, Rossetti rebukes the criticism aimed at him by Thomas Maitland (Robert Buchanan) in “The Fleshly School of Poetry.”]

Your paragraph, a fortnight ago, relating to the pseudonymous authorship of an article, violently assailing myself and other writers of poetry, in the Contemporary Review for October last, reveals a species of critical masquerade which I have expressed in the heading given to this letter. …

The primary accusation, on which this writer grounds all the rest, seems to be that others and myself “extol fleshliness as the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; aver that poetic expression is greater than poetic thought; and, by inference, that the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense.” … It is true, some fragmentary pretence at proof is put in here and there throughout the attack, and thus far an opportunity is given of contesting the assertion.

A Sonnet, entitled ‘Nuptial Sleep’ is quoted and abused at page 338 of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a “whole poem,” describing “merely animal sensations.” It is no more a whole poem in reality, than is any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is entitled ‘The House of Life’; and even in my first published instalment of the whole work [titled ‘Love-Sweetness’] ample evidence is included that no such passing phase of description as the one headed ‘Nuptial Sleep’ could possibly be put forward by the author of ‘The House of Life’ as his own representative view of the subject of love. In proof of this, I will direct attention (among the love-sonnets of this poem) to Nos. 2, 8, 11, 17, 28, and more especially 13, which, indeed, I had better print here.

“LOVE-SWEETNESS”

Sweet dimness of her loosened hair's downfull
          About thy face; her sweet hands round thy head
          In gracious fostering union garlanded;
Her tremulous smiles; her glances' sweet recall
Of love; her murmuring sighs memorial;
          Her mouth's culled sweetness by thy kisses shed
          On cheeks and neck and eyelids, and so led
Back to her mouth which answers there for all:—
What sweeter than these things, except the thing
          In lacking which all these would lose their sweet:—
          The confident hearts still fervour; the swift beat
And soft subsidence of the spirit's wing,
Then when it feels, in cloud-girt wayfaring,
          The breath of kindred plumes against its feet?

Any reader may bring any artistic charge he pleases against [this] sonnet; but one charge it would be impossible to maintain against the writer of the series in which it occurs, and that is, the wish on his part to assert that the body is greater than the soul. For here all the passionate and just delights of the body are declared—somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakably—to be as naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times. Moreover, nearly one half of this series of sonnets has nothing to do with love, but treats of quite other life-influences. I would defy any one to couple with fair quotation of Sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 41, 43, or others, the slander that their author was not impressed, like all other thinking men, with the responsibilities and higher mysteries of life. …

At page 342, an attempt is made to stigmatize four short quotations as being specially “my own property,” that is, (for the context shows the meaning,) as being grossly sensual; though all guiding reference to any precise page or poem in my book is avoided here. The first of these unspecified quotations is from the ‘Last Confession,’ and is the description referring to the harlot's laugh, the hideous character of which, together with its real or imagined resemblance to the laugh heard soon afterwards from the lips of one long cherished as an ideal, is the immediate cause which makes the maddened hero of the poem a murderer. Assailants may say what they please; but no poet or poetic reader will blame me for making the incident recorded in these seven lines as repulsive to the reader as it was to the hearer and beholder. Without this, the chain of motive and result would remain obviously incomplete. …

A second quotation gives the last two lines only of the … sonnet which is the first of four sonnets in ‘The House of Life’ jointly entitled ‘Willowwood.’ …

And as I stooped, her own lips rising there
          Bubbled with brimming kisses at my mouth.

The critic has quoted (as I said) only the last two lines, and he has italicized the second as something unbearable and ridiculous. Of course the inference would be that this was really my own absurd bubble-and-squeak notion of an actual kiss. The reader will perceive at once, from the whole sonnet …, how untrue such an inference would be. The sonnet describes a dream or trance of divided love momentarily re-united by the longing fancy; and in the imagery of the dream, the face of the beloved rises through deep dark waters to kiss the lover. Thus the phrase, “Bubbled with brimming kisses,” & c., bears purely on the special symbolism employed, and from that point of view will be found, I believe, perfectly simple and just.

A third quotation is from ‘Eden Bower,’ and says

What more prize than love to impel thee?
Grip and lip my limbs as I tell thee!

Here again no reference is given, and naturally the reader would suppose that a human embrace is described. The embrace, on the contrary, is that of a fabled snake-woman and a snake. It would be possible still, no doubt, to object on other grounds to this conception; but the ground inferred and relied on for full effect by the critic is none the less an absolute misrepresentation. These three extracts, it will be admitted, are virtually, though not verbally, garbled with malicious intention; and the same is the case, as I have shown, with the sonnet called ‘Nuptial Sleep’ when purposely treated as a “whole poem.” …

It would be humiliating, need one come to serious detail, to have to refute such an accusation as that of “binding oneself by solemn league and convenant to extol fleshliness as the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art”; and one cannot but feel that here every one will think it allowable merely to pass by with a smile the foolish fellow who has brought a charge thus framed against any reasonable man. … That I may, nevertheless, take a wider view than some poets or critics, of how much, in the material conditions absolutely given to man to deal with as distinct from his spiritual aspirations, is admissible within the limits of Art,—this, I say, is possible enough; nor do I wish to shrink from such responsibility. But to state that I do so to the ignoring or overshadowing of spiritual beauty, is an absolute falsehood, impossible to be put forward except in the indulgence of prejudice or rancour.

I have selected, amid much railing or my critic's part, what seemed the most representative indictment against me, and have, so far, answered it. Its remaining clauses set forth how others and myself “aver that poetic expression is greater than poetic thought … and sound superior to sense”—an accusation elsewhere, I observe, expressed by saying that we “wish to create form for its own sake.” … [The accusation] is not against the poetic value of certain work, but against its primary and (by assumption) its admitted aim. And to this I must reply that so far, assuredly, not even Shakespeare himself could desire more arduous human tragedy for development in Art than belongs to the themes I venture to embody, however incalculably higher might be his power of dealing with them. What more inspiring for poetic effort than the terrible Love turned to Hate,—perhaps the deadliest of all passion-woven complexities,—which is the theme of ‘Sister Helen,’ and, in a more fantastic form, of ‘Eden Bower,’—the surroundings of both poems being the mere machinery of a central universal meaning? What, again, more so than the savage penalty exacted for a lost ideal, as expressed in the ‘Last Confession’;—than the outraged love for man and burning compensations in art and memory of ‘Dante at Verona’;—than the baffling problems which the face of ‘Jenny’ conjures up;—or than the analysis of passion and feeling attempted in ‘The House of Life,’ and others among the more purely lyrical poems? I speak here, as does my critic in the clause adduced, of aim not of achievement; and so far, the mere summary is instantly subversive of the preposterous imputation.

As for any literary justice to be done on this particular Mr. Robert-Thomas, I will merely ask the reader whether, once identified, he does not become manifestly his own best “sworn tormentor”? For who will then fail to discern all the palpitations which preceded his final resolve in the great question whether to be or not to be his acknowledged self when he became an assailant? And yet this is he who, from behind his mask, ventures to charge another with “bad blood,” with “insincerity,” and the rest of it (and that where poetic fancies are alone in question); while every word on his own tongue is covert rancour, and every stroke from his pen perversion of truth.