Spasmodic School Poets is a label, coined as a criticism by William Edmonstoune Aytoun, for a loose group of mid-Victorian poets whose work was thought to rely on strained emotion, theatrical rhetoric, and dark, tangled imagery. The term was usually applied to poets such as Alexander Smith, Sydney Dobell, Philip James Bailey, and sometimes John Westland Marston. It was more a satirical category than a real literary school.
Example
Aytoun used the term Spasmodic School Poets to mock Victorian verse that sounded intensely emotional but seemed overdone and obscure.