Spasmodic poets include George Gilfillan, the friend and inspiration of William McGonagall.
Gilfillan worked for thirty years on his long poem Night, but he is best known for his encouragement of the young Spasmodics in literary reviews which he wrote under the pseudonym "Apollodorus".
Others associated with the group were Philip James Bailey, Richard Hengist Horne, Sydney Thompson Dobell, Alexander Smith, John Stanyan Bigg, Gerald Massey, John Westland Marston, and Ebenezer Jones.
[3] The term "spasmodic" was also applied by contemporary reviewers to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Tennyson's Maud, Longfellow's Golden Legend, and the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough.
It was characterized by a number of features including lengthy introspective soliloquies by the protagonist, which led to the charge that the poetry was egotistical.