Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Spasmodic School was christened by its detractors. The term was coined by W. E. Aytoun in his review in Blackwood's of Alexander Smith's Poems of 1853 (75 [March 1854]: 358), and, to quote Smith himself, it ‘had a nickname's best prosperity - it stuck’ (Smith 1868: 171). Aytoun continued his assault by reviewing Firmilian: A Spasmodic Tragedy by T. Percy Jones (75 [May 1854]: 533–51). Both the poem and its author were Aytoun's inventions. Aytoun thought so well of his spoof that he completed Jones's tragedy and published it as an independent volume. It quickly had the desired effect. The work of a group of young poets was laughed out of fashion. Smith's A Life-Drama, the major poem in his 1853 volume, and Sydney Dobell's Balder (1854) are the chief targets of Aytoun's parody. The third is George Gilfillan, the Dundee minister and man of letters who had championed Smith's and Dobell's work in the Critic and the Eclectic Review. These then are the central figures of the Spasmodic School, but other poets, many of them also praised by Gilfillan, are associated with it, amongst them J. Westland Marston, particularly for his Gerald: A Dramatic Poem (1842), Gerald Massey, John Stanyan Bigg and Ebenezer Jones. But the founder of the School was generally identified as Philip Bailey, whose Festus, first published in 1839, was recognized rather widely, not just by Gilfillan, as the great ... log in or subscribe to read full text