This article analyzes the key role played by the eroticizing of feet in the works of major Victorian writers, notably Algernon Charles Swinburne whose early “pagan” poetry explores multiple forms of erotic trampling in connection with Dionysian conceptions of rhythm. Although stigmatized as a form of sexual perversion in the medical discourse of the time, poetic podophilia thus offered liberating prospects to many writers and artists, including the American and hellenophile dancer Isadora Duncan who was also an enthusiastic reader of Swinburne’s poetry, and whose politicized theory of dance, strongly indebted to ancient Greek art, centered on the emancipation of the naked foot and of the female body.