In 1871 under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, Robert Buchanan launched his now notorious attack on D. G. Rossetti entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ in The Contemporary Review. As Marsh indicates, Rossetti had been worried about such an attack when, having exhumed the ‘lost’ poems, he published them along with others as Poems in 1870, but ‘after eighteen months of good reviews and healthy sales’, it would appear to have ‘had little power to injure’ (Marsh 432). However, at the same time Rossetti was intrigued to know the identity of its author and felt sure it would prove to be an old ‘bogey’ and rival poet Robert Buchanan. Rossetti thus planned a response entitled ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism, A Letter to Robert Buchanan Esq. (alias Thomas Maitland)’, while Buchanan expanded his original piece into a pamphlet The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day issued on Rossetti's birthday. The expanded version that covered the theme of indecency more generally and dealt with visual as well as print media tipped Rossetti over the edge. His mental health had been vulnerable, and he was finally unable to withstand the implications of Buchanan's review. For as well as an individual attack it was an assault upon the Pre-Raphaelite investment in ut pictura poesis that for Buchanan denoted an aesthetic theory inseparable from the figure of the hermaphrodite and the dangers of effeminacy. While directing most of its vitriol to Rossetti the review also criticized Morris, Swinburne and Solomon; Buchanan approached them collectively for what he considered the sexual transgressions of their works.

In his vehement critique Buchanan called The Germ ‘an unwholesome periodical’ (Buchanan 340). Even allowing for his characteristic wordplay in the obvious linking of wholesomeness (in the organic metaphor) of the periodical's title, this remains a perplexing statement. What might have been Buchanan's motives in linking in this way the early poetic contents of The Germ with Rossetti's later poetry? What preoccupations of Rossetti's later poetry are evident in those pieces he published in The Germ? Andrea Rose in her facsimile edition maintains that Buchanan's statement is ‘undeserved’ since a great deal in the periodical maintains a moral message for fine art, but more interesting is his motivation in making such a comment.