A study of the poetry, prose, and dramatic writing of key Romantic and Victorian author Walter Savage Landor. The main critical perspective deployed is a theorized interrogation of notions of 'cleanness' and 'contamination' in the work, and by extension in poetry more generally. Cleanness, both in the sense of a neoclassical stylistic purity and of an individual moral and political probity, was centrally important to Walter Savage Landor's writing, both in his prose and poetry.