Cleanness, both in the sense of a neoclassical stylistic purity and of an individual moral and political probity, was centrally important to Walter Savage Landors writing, both in his prose and poetry. At the same time, this commitment to purity was contaminated in a variety of eloquent and complicating uncleannesses: his own fiery temper and frequent rages; his sometimes scurrilous and sexually explicit Latin poems; and the innovative, compacted, proto-Modernistverse style of works such as his epic Gebir, as stylistically-tangled and potent a poem ever produced in the Romantic era. The present study, the first comprehensive study of Landors writing for nearly half a century, addresses the whole of Landors prodigious output over the seven decades of his writing life, in verse, prose, and drama, in English and Latin: from the brief lyrics by which (if at all) he is remembered today up to his idylls, tragedies, and epics; from his pamphlets and essays to historical novels like Pericles and Aspasia and the textual colossus of the Imaginary Conversations.Cleanness becomes the organising principle by which this heterogeneous and multivocal body of work is read. At once a survey of Landors output and life, a critically engaged reading of his work and an interrogation of the principles of poetry itself, Landors Cleanness seeks to reconfigure the map of Romantic andVictorian writing, and move Landors reputation at least some way in the direction of the eminence he once enjoyed: as a major writer of his time, both intensely characteristic of the nineteenth-century and startlingly relevant to the twenty-first.