A couple of interesting points...
"Fowler, like two or three Americans, is an
amateur turned links architect and eternally yearns for the ideal..."
"Some of his notions are well worthy of consideration, but the conception many American players have gained of hiim have conformed roughly to that of the idyllic Bunthorne, the poet of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Patience"."
From Wikipedia;
The opera is a satire on the aesthetic movement of the 1870s and '80s in England, when the output of poets, composers, painters and designers of all kinds was indeed prolific—but, some argued, empty and self-indulgent. This artistic movement was so popular, and also so easy to ridicule as a meaningless fad, that it made Patience a big hit. The topical nature of the story may make Patience somewhat less accessible to some modern audiences, and G&S fans tend to have strong feelings one way or the other about Patience. Modern productions have sometimes "updated" the setting of Patience to an analogous era, such as a hippie Patience, where there is a flower-child poet versus a beat poet.
A popular myth holds that the central character, Bunthorne, a "Fleshly Poet," was intended to satirize Oscar Wilde. However, this identification is retrospective: in fact, the authors hired Wilde, after the fact, to popularize the opera in America (see below). There is a good case to be made that Bunthorne is based on the poets Algernon Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who were considerably more famous than Wilde in 1881. Rossetti had been attacked for immorality by Robert Buchanan (under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland) in an article called "The Fleshly School of Poetry", published in the Contemporary Review for October, 1871. Nonetheless, Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann suggests that Wilde is a partial model for both Bunthorne and his rival Grosvenor. Wilde had recently been satirised by F. C. Burnand in his play The Colonel (February 1881), and he wrote to George Grossmith (who played the role of Bunthorne), having been informed that Bunthorne 'took him off', asking for tickets for the first night.
