CRITICAL WRITINGS ABOUT ROBERT BUCHANAN

“ Mr. Robert Buchanan is a type of artist that every age produces unfailingly: Catulle Mendes is his counterpart in France,—but the pallid Portuguese Jew with his Christ-like face, and his fascinating fervour is more interesting than the spectacled Scotchman. Both began with volumes of excellent but characterless verse, and loud outcries about the dignity of art, and both have—well ... Mr. Robert Buchanan has collaborated with Gus Harris, and written the programme poetry for the Vaudeville Theatre; he has written a novel, the less said about which the better—he has attacked men whose shoestrings he is not fit to tie, and having failed to injure them, he retracted all he said, and launched forth into slimy benedictions. He took Fielding’s masterpiece, degraded it, and debased it; he wrote to the papers that Fielding was a genius in spite of his coarseness, thereby inferring that he was a much greater genius since he had sojourned in this Scotch house of literary ill-fame. Clarville, the author of ‘Madame Angot,’ transformed Madame Marneff into a virtuous woman; but he did not write to the papers to say that Balzac owed him a debt of gratitude on that account.”
                                          From Confessions of a Young Man by George Moore (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1888)

Under The Microscope

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
(London: D. White, 1872)

(This is the 1899 reprint by Thomas B. Mosher which includes an appendix with Buchanan’s poems, “The Session of the Poets” and “The Monkey and the Microscope” and a section on Buchanan’s apology.
Available for download as a zipped .rtf file.)

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Robert Buchanan

From Poets and Novelists; a series of literary studies by George Barnett Smith (1841-1909)
(Smith, Elder, & Co., London, 1875.)

(Originally published in the Contemporary Review (XXII (1873), pp. 872-902). John A. Cassidy in ‘Robert Buchanan and the Fleshly Controversy’ refers to it as follows:
“Reviews of his [Buchanan’s] signed works became noticeably more caustic. The London Quarterly, for instance, which had praised his London Poems and his Orm, was downright insulting in its review of his Poetical Works of 1874, a general collection of his poetry (XLIII, 213-214). The same trend is observable in the reviews by the Athenaeum, Academy, and Westminster Review. A futile attempt to stem the tide was the obvious “puff” given him in the pages of the Contemporary by George Barnett Smith.”

The full text of Poets and Novelists; a series of literary studies is available at the Internet Archive.)

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Chapter X. Latter-Day Singers: Robert Buchanan

From Victorian Poets by Edmund Clarence Stedman
(James R. Osgood and Company, Boston, 1876.)

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Robert Buchanan’s Poetry

From Essays on Poetry and Poets by Roden Noel
(Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1886.)

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To Mr. Robert Buchanan

From Letters to Living Authors by John A. Steuart (1861-1932)
(Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, London, 1890.)

(The full text of Letters to Living Authors is available at the Internet Archive.)

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Robert Buchanan as Poet

From The Sonnet in England, & Other Essays by James Ashcroft Noble (1844-1896)
(Elkin Mathews and John Lane, London, 1893.)

(Expansion of the article in The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, Vol. VI: ‘William Morris to Robert Buchanan’, London: Hutchinson and Company, 1892 pp. 5l7-26. The second edition of which was reviewed in The Guardian of 4th August, 1896 thus:

     “We welcome the reissue in a second edition of the volume entitled “William Morris to Robert Buchanan” in Mr. Alfred H. Miles’s many-volumed Poets and Poetry of the Century (Hutchinson and Co., 8vo, pp. iv., 596, 5s). The selections from J. A. Symonds, Lord de Tabley, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, and Mr. Swinburne have been revised, and as a rule extended, and the volume will introduce many readers for the first time to good and unfamiliar poetry. There is, however, far too much of Roden Noel and Mr. Robert Buchanan.”

The full text of The Sonnet in England, & Other Essays is available at the Internet Archive.)

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Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt

by Archibald Stodart-Walker
 (London: Grant Richards, 1901.)

(The only book-length assessment of Buchanan’s poetry, available online or as a zipped .rtf file.

A facsimile edition of Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt is available for download in a variety for formats at the Internet Archive.) [review]

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Robert Buchanan

From Robert Buchanan: A Critical Appreciation And Other Essays by Henry Murray
(Philip Wellby, 1901.)

(Available online or as a zipped .rtf file.)

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Robert Buchanan

From Studies in Prose and Verse by Arthur Symons
(London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1904.)

(The full text of Studies in Prose and Verse is available at the Internet Archive.)

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Robert Buchanan

From Reticence in Literature, and Other Papers by Arthur Waugh (1866-1943)
(J. G. Wilson, London, 1915.)

(The full text of Reticence in Literature, and Other Papers is available at the Internet Archive.)

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Chapter XII. A Note on Robert Buchanan

From Appreciations of Poetry by Lafcadio Hearn
(Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1916.)

(The full text of Appreciations of Poetry is available at the Internet Archive.)

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The Poetry of Robert Buchanan

by T. L. Adamson
(From The Poetry Review (July-August, 1929.)

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Whitman and Buchanan

by Harold Blodgett
(From American Literature, Vol. 2, No. 2. (May, 1930), pp. 131-140. Duke University Press.)

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Robert Buchanan and the Fleshly Controversy

by John A. Cassidy
(From Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 67, No. 2. (March, 1952), pp. 65-93.)

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Robert Buchanan’s Critical Principles

by George G. Storey
(From Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 68, No. 5. (Dec., 1953), pp. 1228-1232.)

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Nature and the Victorian City: The Ambivalent Attitude of Robert Buchanan

by R. A. Forsyth
(From English Literary History, Vol. 36, No. 2. (June, 1969), pp. 382-415. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.)

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Robert Buchanan and the Dilemma of the Brave New Victorian World

by R. A. Forsyth
(From Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 9, No. 4, Nineteenth Century. (Autumn, 1969), pp. 647-657.)