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Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Portrait by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), 1853. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Born May 12 1828(1828-Template:MONTHNUMBER-12)
London, England
Died April 9 1882(1882-Template:MONTHNUMBER-09) (aged 53)
Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, England
Occupation Poet, Illustrator, Painter
Nationality English
Ethnicity Italian
Citizenship United Kingdom British subject
Literary movement Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (12 May 1828 - 9 April 1882) was an English poet, illustrator, painter, and translator.

Life[]

Overview[]

Rossetti was born in London. His father was Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian scholar, who came to England in 1824, and was professor of Italian in King's Colleg, London. His mother was Frances Polidori, English on her mother's side, so that the poet was 3/4 Italian, and 1/4 English. He was educated at King's College School, and began the systematic study of painting in 1842, and in 1848, with Holman Hunt, Millais, and others, founded the pre-Raphaelite school of painting. In 1849 he exhibited the "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," and among his other pictures are "Beata Beatrix," "Monna Vanna," and "Dante's Dream." Simultaneously with art he worked hard at poetry, and by 1847 he had written "The Blessed Damozel" and "Hand and Soul" (both of which appeared in the Germ, the magazine of the pre-Raphaelites), "Retro me Sathanas," "The Portrait," and "The Choice," and in 1861 he brought out a volume of translations from the early Italian poets under the title of Dante and his Circle. The death of his wife in 1862, after a married life of less than 2 years, told heavily upon him, as did various attacks upon his poetry, including that of Robert Buchanan — "The Fleshly School of Poetry" — to which he replied with "The Stealthy School of Criticism." His Poems which, in the vehemence of his grief, he had buried in the coffin of his wife, and which were afterwards exhumed, appeared in 1870; and his last literary effort, Ballads and Sonnets, containing the sonnets forming The House of Life, in 1881. In his later years he suffered acutely from neuralgia, which led to the habit of taking chloral. Rossetti was fastidious in composition; his poems are as remarkable for condensation, finish, and exact expression of the poet's thought as for their sumptuous colouring and rich concrete imagery. In later years he was subject to depression, and became somewhat embittered, and much of a recluse.[1]

Both John Ruskin and Walter Pater considered him the most important and original artistic force in the 2nd half of the 19th century in Great Britain.[2]

Family, youth, education[]

Gabriele Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Gabriele Rossetti. Drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), 1853. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Rossetti, the eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and of Frances Mary Lavinia (Polidori) (1800–1886), was born on 12 May 1828, at 38 Charlotte Street, Portland Place. His full given name was 'Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, but the form which he gave it has become inveterate. Charles Lyell, father of the geologist, was his godfather.[3]

His father, born at Vasto in the kingdom of Naples on 28 February 1783, had been successively librettist to the opera house and curator of antiquities in the Naples museum, but had been compelled to fly the country for his share in the insurrectionary movements of 1820 and 1821. After a short residence in Malta he came to England in 1824, and established himself as a teacher of Italian. In 1826 he married the sister of John William Polidori. In 1831 he was appointed professor of Italian in King's College. He was a man of high character, an ardent and also a judicious patriot, and an excellent Italian poet; but he is perhaps best remembered by his attempts to establish the esoteric anti-papal significance of the Divine Comedy. He published several works dealing with this question, namely A Commentary on the ‘Divina Commedia,’ 1826-18277 (2 vols.), La Beatrice di Dante, 1842, and Sullo Spirito Antipapale che produsse la riforma, 1832 (placed on the pontifical index and translated into English by Miss C. Ward, 1834, 2 vols). He died on 26 April 1854, leaving 4 children: Maria Francesca, Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Georgina.[3]

Dante Rossetti's environment — political, literary, and artistic — was such as to stimulate his precocious powers. At the age of 5 or 6 he composed 3 dramatic scenes entitled "The Slave," childish in diction, but correct in spelling and meter. At the age of 8 he went to a preparatory school, and at 9 to King's College, which he left at 13, having made fair progress in the ordinary branches of knowledge. His reading at home was more important to him; his imagination was powerfully stimulated by a succession of romances, though he does not appear to have been then acquainted with any English poets except Shakespeare, Byron, and Walter Scott. The influence of the last is visible in his boyish ballad of Sir Hugh the Heron, written in 1840, and printed 3 years later at his maternal grandfather's private press.[3]

Rossetti was taught drawing at King's College by an eminent master, John Sell Cotman, and upon leaving school in November 1841 he selected art as his profession. He spent 4 years at F.S. Cary's drawing academy in Bloomsbury Street, where he attracted notice by his readiness in sketching "chivalric and satiric subjects." Neither there nor at the antique school of the Royal Academy, where he was admitted in 1846, was his progress remarkable. The fact appears to have been that in his impatience for great results he neglected the slow and tiresome but necessary subservient processes.[3]

His literary work was much more distinguished, for the translations from Dante and his contemporaries, published in 1861, were commenced as early as 1845. Up to this time he seems to have known little of Dante, notwithstanding his father's devotion to him. By 1850 his translation of Dante was sufficiently advanced to be shown to Tennyson, who commended it, but he advised careful revision, which was given. His poetical faculty received about this time a powerful stimulus from his study of Browning and Poe, both of whom he idolised without imitating either. He would seem, indeed, to have owed more at this period to imaginative prose writers than to poets, although he copied the whole of Browning's Pauline at the British Museum..[3] ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ ‘The Portrait,’ the splendid sonnets ‘Retro me Sathana’ and ‘The Choice,’ with other remarkable poems, were written about 1847. They manifest nothing of young poets' usual allegiance to models, but are absolutely original—the product, no doubt, of the unparalleled confluence of English and Italian elements in his blood and nurture. The result was as exceptional as the process.[3]

The astonishing advance in poetical powers from ‘Sir Hugh the Heron’ to ‘The Blessed Damozel’ had not been visibly attended by any corresponding development of the pictorial faculty, when in March 1848 Rossetti took what proved the momentous step of applying for instruction to Ford Madox Brown. His motive seems to have been impatience with the technicalities of academy training,[3] and the hope of finding a royal road to painting; great, therefore, was his disappointment when his new instructor set him to paint pickle-jars. The lesson was no doubt salutary, although, as his brother says, he never to the end of his life could be brought to care much whether his pictures were in perspective or not.[4]

Pre-Raphaelite[]

Rossetti selbst

Self-portrait, 1847. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Main article: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

More important was Rossetti's introduction through the school of the Royal Academy to a circle of young men inspired by new ideas in art, by a resolve to abandon the conventionalities inherited from the 18th century, and to revive the detailed elaboration and mystical interpretation of nature that characterised early mediæval art. Goethe and Scott had already done much to impregnate modern literature with mediæval sentiment. A renaissance of the like feeling was visible in the pictorial art of Germany. But what in Germany was pure imitation became in England re-creation, partly because the English artists were men of higher powers. Little, however, would have resulted but for the fortune which brought Rossetti, Madox Brown, Woolner, Holman Hunt, and Millais together. The atmosphere of enthusiasm thus engendered raised all to greater heights than any could have attained by himself.[4]

By 1849 the student of pickle-jars had painted and exhibited at the free exhibition, Hyde Park Corner, a picture of high merit, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," which sold for 80l. One inevitable drawback was a spirit of cliquishness; another, which might have been avoided, was the assumption of the unlucky badge of "pre-Raphaelite," indicative of a feeling which, though Rossetti shared in early years to a marked degree, he very soon abandoned. No one could have less sympathy with the ugly, the formal, or the merely edifying in art, and his reproduction of nature was never microscopic. The virtues and failings of the 'pre-Raphaelite’ school were well displayed in the short-lived periodical The Germ, 4 numbers of which appeared at the beginning of 1850, under the editorship of Rossetti's brother William Michael, and to which he himself contributed "The Blessed Damozel" and the only imaginative work in prose he completed, the delicate and spiritual story "Hand and Soul."[4]

In November 1852 Rossetti, who had initially shared a studio with Holman Hunt in Cleveland Street, and afterwards had his own studio in Newman Street, took rooms at 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge, which he continued to occupy until his wife's death. (The street is now pulled down.) From 1849 to his father's death in 1854 his history is one of steady progress in art and poetry, varied only by the attacks, now incomprehensible in their virulence, made by the press upon the pre-Raphaelite artists, and by a short trip to Paris and Belgium, which produced nothing but some extremely vivid descriptive verse. It is astonishing that he should never have cared to visit Italy, but so it was.[4]

The years were years of struggle; the hostile criticisms made his pictures difficult to sell, although "The Annunciation" was among them. He eschewed the Royal Academy, and did not even seek publicity for his poems, albeit they included such masterpieces as ‘Sister Helen,’ ‘Staff and Scrip,’ and ‘The Burden of Nineveh.’ These alone proved that Rossetti had risen into a region of imagination where he had no compeer among the poets of his day. Rossetti did not want for an Egeria; he had fallen in love with Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, daughter of a Sheffield cutler and herself a milliner's assistant, a young lady of remarkable personal attractions, who had sat to his friend Walter Deverell as the Viola of ‘Twelfth Night,’ and came to display no common ability both in verse and water-colour painting. Her constitution, unhappily, was consumptive, and delicacy of health and scantiness of means long deferred the consummation of an engagement probably formed about the end of 1851. She sat to him for most of the numerous Beatrices which he produced about this time. A beautiful portrait of her, from a picture by herself, is reproduced in the Letters and Memoirs edited by his brother.[4]

Rossetti's partial deliverance from his embarrassments was owing to the munificence of a man as richly endowed with genius as he himself, and much more richly provided with the gifts of fortune. In spite of some prevalent misconceptions, it may be confidently affirmed that John Ruskin had nothing whatever to do with initiating the pre-Raphaelite movement, and that even his subsequent influence upon its representatives was slight. It was impossible, however, that he should not deeply sympathise with their work, which he generously defended in the ‘Times;’ and the personal acquaintance which he could not well avoid making with Rossetti soon led to an arrangement by which Ruskin agreed to take, up to a certain maximum of expenditure, whatever work of Rossetti's pleased him, at the same prices as Rossetti would have asked from an ordinary customer. The comfort and certainty of such an arrangement were invaluable to Rossetti, whose constant altercations with other patrons and with dealers bring out the least attractive side of his character.[4] The arrangement lasted a considerable time; that it should eventually die lay in the nature of things. Ruskin was bound to criticise, and Rossetti to resent criticism. Before its termination, however, Mr. Ruskin, by another piece of generosity, had enabled Rossetti to publish in 1861 his translations of the early Italian poets.[5]

Another important friendship made in these years of struggle was that with Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who came to Rossetti, as he himself had gone to Madox Brown, for help and guidance, and repaid him by introducing him to an Oxford circle destined to exercise the greatest influence upon him and receive it in turn. Its most important members were Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Morris. Other and more immediately visible results of the new connection were the appearance of 3 of Rossetti's finest poems in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, to which Morris was an extensive contributor, and his share (1857) in the distemper decorations of the Oxford Union, which soon became a wreck, "predestined to ruin," says W.M. Rossetti, "by fate and climate."[5]

Artistic maturity[]

Paolo and Francesca da Rimini (1855)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, 1855. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Around 1857 "The Seed of David," a triptych for Llandaff Cathedral (Rossetti's only monumental work), representing the Infant Saviour adored as Shepherd and King, with pendants depicting David in both characters, was undertaken, though not completed for some time afterwards. It is most difficult to date Rossetti's pictures from the variety of forms in which most of them exist, and the uncertainty whether to adopt as date that of the original sketch, or of some one of the completed versions. Generally speaking, however, his most inspired work may be referred to the decade between 1850 and 1860, especially the magnificent drawings illustrative of the ‘Vita Nuova.’ ‘Mary Magdalen,’ ‘Monna Rosa,’ ‘Hesterna Rosa,’ ‘How they met themselves,’ ‘Paolo and Francesca,’ ‘Cassandra,’ and the Borgia drawings may be added. These were the pictorial works in which Rossetti stands forth most distinctly as a poet. He may at a later period have exhibited even greater mastery in his other predominant endowment, that of colour; but the achievement, though great, is of a lower order.[5]

Another artistic enterprise of this period was his illustration of Tennyson, undertaken for Edward Moxon, in conjunction with Millais and other artists (1857). The fine drawings were grievously marred by the carelessness and mechanical spirit of the wood-engravers. He succeeded better in book illustration at a somewhat later date, especially in the matchless frontispiece to his sister's ‘Goblin Market’ (1862). He was also labouring much, and not to his satisfaction, on his one realistic picture, ‘Found,’ an illustration of the tragedy of seduction, occupying the place among his pictures which ‘Jenny’ holds among his poems. It was never quite completed. Somewhat later he became interested in the undertaking of William Morris and Madox Brown, for that revival of art manufacture, which produced important results.[5]

During this period he wrote little poetry, designedly holding his poetical gift in abeyance for the undivided pursuit of art. The Early Italian Poets, however, went to press in 1861, and was greeted with enthusiasm by Coventry Patmore and other excellent judges. The edition was sold in 8 years, leaving Rossetti £9 the richer after the acquittal of his obligation to Mr. Ruskin. It was, however, reprinted in 1874 under the title of Dante and his Circle, with the Italian Poets preceding him: a collection of Lyrics, edited and translated in the original metres.[5] The book is a garden of enchanting poetry, steeped in the Italian spirit, but, while faithful to all the higher offices of translation, by no means so scrupulously literal as is usually taken for granted. The greatest successes are achieved in the pieces apparently most difficult to render, the ballate and canzoni. That these triumphs are due to genius and labour, and not to the accident of Rossetti's Italian blood, is shown by the fact that he evinced equal felicity in his renderings of François Villon. The Early Italian Poets comprised also the prose passages of the ‘Vita Nuova,’ admirably translated.[5]

Rossetti's marriage with Miss Siddal took place at Hastings on 23 May 1860. He had said, in a letter written a month previously, that she "seemed ready to die daily." He took her to Paris, and on their return they settled at his old rooms at Chatham Place.[5]

Around 1860, Rossetti returned to oil painting, abandoning the dense medieval compositions of the 1850s in favour of powerful close-up images of women in flat pictorial spaces characterized by dense color. These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement.[6] In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess. "As in Rossetti's previous reforms, the new kind of subject appeared in the context of a wholesale reconfiguration of the practice of painting, from the most basic level of materials and techniques up to the most abstract or conceptual level of the meanings and ideas that can be embodied in visual form."[6] These new works were based not on medievalism, but on the Italian High Renaissance artists of Venice, Titian and Veronese.[6][7]

In 1861, Rossetti became a founding partner in the decorative arts firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Morris, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall. Rossetti contributed designs for stained glass and other decorative objects.

No length of days could have been anticipated for Mrs. Rossetti, but her existence closed prematurely on 11 February 1862, from the effects of an overdose of laudanum, taken to relieve neuralgia. Rossetti's grief found expression in a manner most characteristic of him, the entombment of his manuscript poems in his wife's coffin. They remained there until October 1869, when he was fortunately persuaded to consent to their disinterment.[5]

Cheyne Walk[]

William Bell Scott; John Ruskin; Dante Gabriel Rossetti by William Downey

William Bell Scott (l), John Ruskin, and Rosetti, 1863. Photo by William Downey (1829-1915). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Chatham Place had naturally become an impossible residence for him, and he soon moved to Tudor House, Cheyne Walk, a large house which for some time harboured 3 sub-tenants as well — his brother, Swinburne,[5] and George Meredith. Rossetti occupied it for the rest of his life.[8]

For the 7 years following his wife's death Rossetti was an ardent collector of old furniture, blue china, and Japanese bric-à-brac. The same period proved a time of great pictorial productiveness, and his partiality for single figures, generally more or less idealised portraits, increased. The place in this department which had been held by his wife and the beautiful actress, Miss Herbert, was now to a large extent filled by Mrs. William Morris; but many beauties in all ranks of society were proud to sit to him, as appears from the list given by his brother (Letters and Memoirs, i. 242–3). He hardly ever attempted ordinary portraiture, except of himself or some very intimate friend or near connection. Among the most famous of the single figures painted about this time may be mentioned ‘Beata Beatrix,’ ‘Monna Vanna,’ ‘Monna Pomona,’ ‘Il Ramoscello,’ ‘Venus Verticordia,’ and ‘Sibylla Palmifera.’ Of work on a grander scale there is little to notice, though some previous works were repeated with improvements. ‘The Return of Tibullus to Delia,’ one of the most dramatic of his productions of this period, exists only as a drawing; and he never carried out the intention he now entertained of making a finished picture from his magnificent drawing of ‘Cassandra.’[8]

A work of still more importance fortunately was accomplished, the publication of his collected Poems in 1870 (new edit. 1881).[8]

Character[]

Completepoetical00rossuoft 0010

Rossetti in Complete Poetical Works, 1887. Courtesy Internet Archive.

Rossetti the man was, before all things, an artist. Many departments of human activity had no existence for him. He was superstitious in grain and anti-scientific to the marrow. His reasoning powers were hardly beyond the average; but his instincts were potent, and his perceptions keen and true. Carried away by his impulses, he frequently acted with rudeness, inconsiderateness, and selfishness. But if a thing could be presented to him from an artistic point of view, he apprehended it in the same spirit as he would have apprehended a subject for a painting or a poem.[9]

Hence, if in some respects his actions and expressions seem deficient in right feeling, he appears in other respects the most self-denying and disinterested of men. He was unsurpassed in the filial and fraternal relations; he was absolutely superior to jealousy or envy, and none felt a keener delight in noticing and aiding a youthful writer of merit.[9]

His acquaintance with literature was almost entirely confined to works of imagination.[9] Within these limits his critical faculty was admirable, not deeply penetrative, but always embodying the soundest common-sense. His few critical essays are excellent. His memory was almost preternatural, and his knowledge of favourite writers, such as Shakespeare, Dante, Scott, Dumas, exhaustive.[10]

It is lamentable that his soundness of judgment should have deserted him in his own case, and that he should have been unable to share the man of genius's serene confidence that not all the powers of dulness and malignity combined can, in the long run, deprive him of a particle of his real due. He altered sonnets in ‘The House of Life’ in deference to what he knew to be unjust and even absurd strictures, and the alterations remain in the English editions, though the original readings have been restored in the beautiful Boston reprint of Copeland & Day. His distaste for travel and indifference to natural beauty were surprising characteristics, the latter especially so in consideration of the gifts of observation and description so frequently evinced in his poetry.[10]

Last years[]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti by George Frederic Watts

Portrait by George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), circa 1871. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The savage reaction of critics to Rossetti's debut collection of poetry contributed to a mental breakdown in June 1872, and although he joined Jane at Kelmscott that September, he "spent his days in a haze of chloral and whisky"[11] Much of the remainder of Rossetti's life is a tragedy which may be summed up in a phrase: ‘chloral and its consequences.’ Weak in health, suffering from neuralgic agony and consequent insomnia, he had been introduced to the drug by a compassionate but injudicious friend. Whatever Rossetti did was in an extreme, and he soon became entirely enslaved to the potion, whose ill effects were augmented by the whisky he took to relieve its nauseousness.[8]

His conduct under the next trouble that visited him attested the disastrously enfeebling effect of the drug upon his character. In October 1871 an article entitled "The Fleshly School of Poetry," and signed Thomas Maitland (soon ascertained to be a pseudonym for Robert Buchanan), had appeared in the Contemporary Review.’ In this some of Rossetti's sonnets were stigmatised as indecent. Rossetti initially contented himself with a calm reply in the Athenæum, headed "The Stealthy School of Criticism," and with a stinging "nonsense-verse" hurled at the offender when he discovered his identity. But the republication of the article in pamphlet form, with additions, early in 1872, threw him completely off his balance. He fancied himself the subject of universal obloquy, and detected poisoned arrows in "Fifine at the Fair" and the "Hunting of the Snark."[8]

On 2 June his brother was compelled to question his sanity, and he was moved to the house of Dr. Hake, "the earthly Providence of the Rossetti family in those dark days." Left alone at night, he swallowed laudanum, which he had secretly brought with him, and his condition was not ascertained until the following afternoon. Rossetti's recovery was due to the presence of mind of Ford Madox Brown, who, when summoned, brought with him surgeon John Marshall (1818–1891), who saved Rossetti's life.[8]

He was still in the deepest prostration of spirits, and suffered from a partial paralysis, which gradually wore off. He sought change and repose, first in Scotland, afterwards with William Morris at Kelmscott Manor House in Oxfordshire, and on other trips and visits. The history of them all is nearly the same sad story of groundless jealousy, morbid suspicion, fitful passion, and what but for his irresponsible condition would have been inexcusable selfishness. At last he wore out the patience and charity of many of his most faithful friends. Those less severely tried, such as Madox Brown and Marshall, preserved their loyalty; Theodore Watts-Dunton, a new friend, proved himself invaluable; William Sharp, Frederick Shields, and others cheered the invalid by frequent visits; and his own family showed devoted affection. But the chloral dosing went on, forbidding all hope of real amendment.[8]


Rossetti, who had been a contributor to the 1st edition of Gilchrist's Life of Blake in 1863, interested himself warmly in the 2nd edition of 1880. His letters of this period to Hall Caine, William Sharp, and others show excellent critical judgment and undiminished enthusiasm for literature. He also, very shortly before his death, completed the still unpublished ‘Jan van Hunks,’ a metrical tale of a smoking Dutchman (originally composed at a very early date). His painting, having never been intermitted, could not experience the same marvellous revival as his poetry, but 4 single figures, ‘La Bella Mano’ (1875), ‘Venus Astarte’ (1877), and, still later, ‘The Vision of Fiammetta’ and ‘A Day Dream,’ rank high among his work of that class. His last really great picture, ‘Dante's Dream,’ was painted in oil in 1869–71, at the beginning of the hapless chloral period; he had treated the same subject in watercolour in 1855.[9]

Mr. Hall Caine was an inmate of Rossetti's house from July 1881 to his death, and did much to soothe the inevitable misery of the entire break-up of his once powerful constitution. One last consolation was the abandonment of chloral in December 1881, under the close supervision of his medical attendant, Mr. Henry Maudsley. He died at Birchington, near Margate, 9 April 1882, attended by his nearest relatives, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. Caine, and Mr. F. Shields. He was interred at Birchington under a tomb designed by Madox Brown, bearing an epitaph written by his brother.[9]

Writing[]

Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_1828_1882_Painter_&_Poet

Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828 1882 Painter & Poet

Rossetti's early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence The House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti's work; he frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) to Astarte Syriaca (1877), nearly his last completed work.

Rossetti is a unique instance of an Englishman who has obtained equal celebrity as a poet and as a painter. It has been disputed in which class he stands higher; but as his mastery of the poetic art was consummate, while he failed to perfectly acquire even the grammar of painting, there should seem no reasonable doubt that his higher rank is as a poet. His inability to grapple with the technicalities of painting was especially unfortunate, inasmuch as it encouraged him to evade them by confining himself to single figures, whose charm was mainly sensuous, while his power, apart from the magic of his colour, resided principally in his representation of spiritual emotion. The more spiritual he was the higher he rose, and highest of all in his Dante pictures, where every accessary and detail aids in producing the impression of almost supernatural pathos and purity. More earthly emotion is at the same time expressed with extraordinary force in his ‘Cassandra’ and other productions; and even when he is little else than the colourist, his colour is poetry.[9]

The same versatility is conspicuous in his poems, the searing passion of ‘Sister Helen’ or the breathless agitation of the ‘King's Tragedy’ being not more masterly in their way than the intricate cadences and lingering dalliance with thought of ‘The Portrait’ and ‘The Stream's Secret,’ the stately magnificence of the best sonnets, and the intensity of some of the minor lyrics. Everywhere he is daringly original, intensely passionate, and ‘of imagination all compact.’ His music is as perfect as the music can be that always produces the effect of studied artifice, never of spontaneous impulse; his glowing and sumptuous diction is his own, borrowed from none, and incapable of successful imitation. Than him young poets can find few better inspirers, and few worse models. His total indifference to the political and religious struggles of his age, if it limited his influence, had at all events the good effect of eliminating all unpoetical elements from his verse. He is a poet or nothing, and everywhere a poet almost faultless from his own point of view, wanting no charm but the highest of all, and the first on Milton's list — simplicity. Notwithstanding this defect, he must be placed very high on the roll of English poets.[9]

The Blessed Damozel,’ ‘The Portrait,’ the splendid sonnets ‘Retro me Sathana’ and ‘The Choice,’ with other remarkable poems, were written about 1847. They manifest nothing of young poets' usual allegiance to models, but are absolutely original—the product, no doubt, of the unparalleled confluence of English and Italian elements in his blood and nurture. The result was as exceptional as the process.[3]

Rowe's book of translations from the Italian, Dante and his Circle, with the Italian Poets preceding him: a collection of Lyrics, edited and translated in the original metres(1861) is a garden of enchanting poetry, steeped in the Italian spirit, but, while faithful to all the higher offices of translation, by no means so scrupulously literal as is usually taken for granted. The greatest successes are achieved in the pieces apparently most difficult to render, the ballate and canzoni. That these triumphs are due to genius and labour, and not to the accident of Rossetti's Italian blood, is shown by the fact that he evinced equal felicity in his renderings of François Villon. The Early Italian Poets comprised also the prose passages of the ‘Vita Nuova,’ admirably translated.[5]

The new pieces in Poems (1870) fully supported the reputation of those which had already appeared in magazines; and the entire volume gave him, in the eyes of competent judges, a reputation 2nd to that of no contemporary English poet after Tennyson and Browning.[5]

The most astonishing fact in Rossetti's history is the sudden rekindling of his poetical faculty in his later years, almost in greater force than ever. "Chloral," says his brother, "had little or no power over that part of his mind which was purely intellectual or inventive." The magnificent ballad-epic of ‘Rose Mary’ had been written in 1871, just before the clouds darkened round him. To this, in 1880, were added, partly under the friendly pressure of Watts-Dunton, ‘The White Ship’ and ‘The King's Tragedy,’ ballads even superior in force, if less potent in imagination. The 3 were published towards the end of 1881, together with other new poems, chiefly sonnets,[8] in a volume entitled Ballads and Sonnets, which was unanimously recognised as equal in all respects to that of 1870. Some of its beauties, indeed, were borrowed from its predecessor, a number of sonnets being transferred to its pages to complete the century entitled "The House of Life," the gap thus occasioned in the former volume being made good by the publication of the "Bride's Prelude," an early poem of considerable length.[9]

Critical introduction[]

by Walter Pater

It was characteristic of a poet who had ever something about him of mystic isolation, and will still appeal perhaps, though with a name it may seem now established in English literature, to a special and limited audience, that some of his poems had won a kind of exquisite fame before they were in the full sense published. "The Blessed Damozel", although actually printed twice before the year 1870, was eagerly circulated in manuscript; and the volume which it now opens came at last to satisfy a long-standing curiosity as to the poet, whose pictures also had become an object of the same peculiar kind of interest. For those poems were the work of a painter, understood to belong to, and to be indeed the leader, of a new school then rising into note; and the reader of to-day may observe already,in "The Blessed Damozel", written at the age of 18, a prefigurement of the chief characteristics of that school, as he will recognize in it also, in proportion as he really knows Rossetti, many of the characteristics which are most markedly personal and his own.

Common to that school and to him, and in both alike of primary significance, was the quality of sincerity, already felt as one of the charms of that earliest poem—a perfect sincerity, taking effect in the deliberate use of the most direct and unconventional expression, for the conveyance of a poetic sense which recognised no conventional standard of what poetry was called upon to be.

At a time when poetic originality in England might seem to have had its utmost play, here was certainly another new poet, with a structure and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent, unmistakeably novel, yet felt to be no mere tricks of manner adopted with a view to forcing attention — an accent which might rather count as the very seal of reality on one man’s own proper speech; as that speech itself was the wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he really felt and saw. Here was a poet who had a matter to present to his readers, or to himself at least, so valuable, so real and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression in his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within.

That he had this gift of transparency in language — the control of a style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion, as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing paper the outline of an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a volume of typically perfect translations from the delightful but difficult ‘early Italian poets’: such transparency being indeed the secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong to one man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal and even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes complex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see, deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript of that peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew it.

A peculiarity of "The Blessed Damozel" was a definiteness of sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold bar of heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are but examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as the pictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who has shown a similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse; there, too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision.

Such definition of outline is indeed one among many points in which Rossetti resembles the great Italian poet, of whom, led to him initially by family circumstances, he was ever a lover—‘a servant and singer,’ as faithful, as Dante ‘of Florence and of Beatrice’—with some close inward conformities of genius, independent of any mere circumstances of education. It was said by a critic of the last century, not wisely though agreeably to the practice of his time, that poetry rejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as for Dante, without question on his part, the most fundamental condition of the poetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularisation. ‘Tell me now,’ he writes, for Villon’s

  ‘Dictes-moy où, n’en quel pays,
Est Flora, la belle Romaine’—
  
‘Tell me now, in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman:’

—‘way,’ in which someone might actually chance to meet her; the unmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent on the definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on in the search after a difficult double rhyme) for which everyone else would have written, like Villon himself, a more general one, just equivalent to place or region.

And this delight in concrete definition is allied with another of his conformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, of his personifications—his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from him. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the winged spirit of Love, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole ‘populace’ of special hours and places, ‘the hour’ even ‘which might have been, yet might not be,’ are living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulate voices.

  ‘Stands it not by the door—
  Love’s Hour—till she and I shall meet;
With bodiless form and unapparent feet
  That cast no shadow yet before,
Though round its head the dawn begins to pour
    The breath that makes day sweet?’—
  
                        ‘Nay, why
Name the dead hours? I mind them well:
Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell
  With desolate eyes to know them by.’

Poetry as a mania — one of Plato’s 2 higher forms of ‘divine’ mania — has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the ‘defect of its quality,’ into which it may lapse in its moment of weakness: and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there in his work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising of abstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of the scholastic realism of the Middle Age.

In "Love’s Nocturn" and "The Stream’s Secret", congruously perhaps with a certain feverishness of soul in the moods they present, there is in places a near approach (may it be said?) to such insanity of realism—

  ‘Pity and love shall burn
  In her pressed cheek and cherishing hands;
And from the living spirit of love that stands
  Between her lips to soothe and yearn,
Each separate breath shall clasp me round in turn
    And loose my spirit’s bands.’

But even if we concede this,— if we allow, in the very plan of those 2 compositions, something of the literary conceit — what exquisite, what novel flowers of poetry, we must admit them to be, as they stand! In the one, what a delight in all the natural beauty of water, all its details for the eye of a painter; in the other, how subtle and fine the imaginative hold upon all the secret ways of sleep and dreams! In both of them, with much the same attitude and tone, Love—sick and doubtful Love—would fain inquire of what lies below the surface of sleep, and below the water; stream or dream being forced to speak by Love’s powerful ‘control’; and the poet would have it foretell the fortune, issue, and event of his wasting passion. Such artifices were not unknown in the old Provençal poetry of which Dante had learned something. Only, in Rossetti at least, they are redeemed by a serious purpose, by that sincerity of his, which allies itself readily to a serious beauty, a sort of grandeur of literary workmanship—to a great style. One seems to hear there a really new kind of poetic utterance, with effects which have nothing else like them; as there is nothing else, for instance, like the narrative of Jacob’s Dream, or Blake’s design of the Singing of the Morning Stars, or Addison’s Nineteenth Psalm.

With him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopœic age, common things — dawn, noon, night — are full of human or personal expression, full of sentiment. The lovely little sceneries scattered up and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broad open-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon the picturesque effect of a few selected objects — the "hollow brimmed with mist," or the "ruined weir," as he sees it from a window, or reflected in a mirror of his "house of life" (the vignettes for instance seen by Rose Mary in the magic beryl) attest, by their very freshness and simplicity, to a pictorial or descriptive power in dealing with the inanimate world, which is certainly still one half of the charm, in that other, more remote and mystic, use of it. For with Rossetti this sense of, after all lifeless, nature, is translated to a higher service, in which it does but incorporate itself with some phase of strong emotion.

Everyone understands how this may happen at critical moments of life; what a weirdly expressive soul may have crept, even in full noonday, into ‘the white-flower’d elder-thicket,’ when Godiva saw it ‘gleam through the Gothic archways in the wall,’ at the end of her ride. To Rossetti it is so always, because to him life is a crisis at every moment. A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions of man’s every-day life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives a singular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite to him. But throughout, it is the ideal intensity of love—of love based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or material beauty, which is enthroned in the midst of those mysterious powers; Youth and Death, Destiny and Fortune, Fame — Poetic Fame, Memory, Oblivion, and the like. Rossetti is one of those who, in the words of Mérimée, se passionnent pour la passion, one of Love’s lovers.

And yet, again as with Dante, to speak of his ideal type of beauty as material, is partly misleading. Spirit and matter indeed have been for the most part opposed, with a false contrast or antagonism, by schoolmen, whose artificial creation those abstractions really are. In our actual concrete experience, the 2 trains of phenomena which they do but roughly distinguish, play inextricably into each other. Practically, the church of the Middle Age by its æsthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in the resurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manichean opposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men’s way of taking life; and in this, Dante is the central representative of its spirit. To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent: if the spiritual attains the definite character of a crystal, what is material loses its earthiness and impurity. And here again, by force of instinct, Rossetti is one with him. His chosen type of beauty is one,

  ‘Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought,
Nor Love her body from her soul.’

Like Dante, he knows no region of spirit which shall not be sensuous also, or material. The shadowy world, which he realises so powerfully, has still the ways and houses, the land and water, the light and darkness, the fire and flowers, that had so much to do in the moulding of those bodily powers and aspects which counted for so large a part of the soul, here.

For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other, swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius, mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great undeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a world where all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of those affections—of the great love so determined; its casuistries, its languor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or unfortunate collisions with those other great matters; how it looks, as the long day of life goes round, in the light and shadow of them—that, conceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a philosophic reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse, and especially of what he designed as his chief poetic work, ‘a work to be called The House of Life,’ towards which the majority of his sonnets and songs were contributions.

The dwelling-place in which one finds oneself by chance or destiny, yet can partly fashion for oneself; never properly one’s own at all, if it be changed too lightly; in which every object has its associations—the dim mirrors, the portraits, the lamps, the books, the hair-tresses of the dead and visionary magic crystals in the secret drawers, the names and words scratched on the windows—windows open upon prospects the saddest or the sweetest—the house which one must quit, yet taking perhaps how much of its quietly active light and colour along with us!—grown now to be a kind of raiment to one’s body, as the body, according to Swedenborg, is but the raiment of the soul—under that image, the whole of Rossetti’s work might count as a House of Life, of which he is but the ‘Interpreter.’

And it is a ‘haunted’ house. A sense of power in love, defying distance, and those barriers which are so much more than physical distance—of unutterable desire penetrating into the world of sleep, however lead-bound, was one of those anticipative notes obscurely struck in "The Blessed Damozel," and, in his later work, makes him speak sometimes almost like a believer in mesmerism. Dream-land, as we said, with its ‘phantoms of the body,’ deftly coming and going on love’s service, is to him, in no mere fancy or figure of speech, a real country, a veritable expansion of, or addition to, our waking life; and he did well perhaps to wait carefully upon sleep, the lack of which became mortal disease with him. One may recognise even a sort of over-hasty and morbid making ready for death itself, which increases on him; the thoughts and imageries of it coming with a frequency and importunity, in excess, one might think, of even the very saddest, quite wholesome wisdom.

And indeed the publication of his 2nd volume of Ballads and Sonnets preceded his death by scarcely a twelvemonth. That volume bears witness to the reverse of any failure of power or falling-off from his early standard of literary perfection, in every one of his then accustomed forms of poetry—the song, the sonnet, and the ballad. The newly printed sonnets, now completing the House of Life, certainly advanced beyond those earlier ones, in clearness; his dramatic power in the ballad, was here at its height; while a monumental lyrical piece, "Soothsay," testifies, more clearly even than the "Nineveh" of his debut volume, to the reflective force, the dry reason, always at work behind his imaginative creations, which at no time dispensed with a genuine intellectual structure. For in matters of pure reflection also, Rossetti maintained the painter’s sensuous clearness of conception; and this has something to do with the capacity, largely illustrated by his ballads, of telling some red-hearted story of impassioned action with effect.

Were there indeed ages, in which the external conditions of poetry such as Rossetti’s were of more spontaneous growth than in our own? The archaic side of Rossetti’s work, his preferences in regard to earlier poetry, connect him with those who have certainly thought so, who fancied they could have breathed more largely in the age of Chaucer, or of Ronsard, in one of those ages, in the words of Stendhal—ces siècles de passions ou les âmes pouvaient se livrer franchement à la plus haute exaltation, quand les passions qui font la possibilité comme les sujets des beaux arts existaient. We may think, perhaps, that such old time as that has never really existed except in the fancy of poets; but it was to find it, that Rossetti turned so often from modern life to the chronicle of the past. Old Scotch history, perhaps beyond any other, is strong in the matter of heroic and vehement hatreds and love, the tragic Mary herself being but the perfect blossom of them; and it is from that history that Rossetti has taken the subjects of the 2 longer ballads of his 2nd volume: of the 3 admirable ballads in it, "The King’s Tragedy" (in which Rossetti has dexterously interwoven some relics of James’s own exquisite early verse) reaching the highest level of dramatic success, and marking perfection, perhaps, in this kind of poetry; which, in the earlier volume, gave us, among other pieces, "Troy Town," "Sister Helen," and "Eden Bower".

Like those earlier pieces, the ballads of the 2nd volume bring with them the question of the poetic value of the ‘refrain’—

  ‘Eden bower ’s in flower:
And O the bower and the hour!’

— and the like. 2 of those ballads — "Troy Town" and "Eden Bower" — are terrible in theme; and the refrain serves, perhaps, to relieve their bold aim at the sentiment of terror. In Sister Helen again, it has a real, sustained purpose (being here duly varied also) and performs the part of a chorus, as the story proceeds. Yet even in these cases, whatever its effect may be in actual recitation, it may indeed be questioned, whether, to the mere reader their actual effect is not that of a positive interruption and drawback, at least in pieces so lengthy; and Rossetti himself, it would seem, came to think so, for in the shortest of his later ballads. The White Ship—that old true history of the generosity with which a youth, worthless in life, flung himself upon death — he has contented himself with a single utterance of the refrain, ‘given out’ like the key-note or tune of a chant.

In "The King’s Tragedy", Rossetti has worked upon a motive, broadly human, in the phrase of popular criticism, such as one and all may realise. Rossetti, indeed, with all his self-concentration upon his own circle of work, by no means ignored those general interests which are external to poetry as he conceived it; as he has shown here and there, in this poetic, as also in pictorial, work. It was but that, in a life to be shorter even than the average, he found enough to occupy him in the fulfilment of a task, plainly ‘given him to do.’ Perhaps, if therew as a need to name a single composition of his to a reader who desired to make his acquaintance, it is "The King’s Tragedy" — that poem so moving, so popularly dramatic and lifelike. Notwithstanding this, his work, it must be conceded, certainly through no narrowness or egotism, but in the faithfulness of a true workman to a vocation so emphatic, was mainly of the esoteric order. But poetry, at all times, exercises 2 distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common things, after Gray’s way (though Gray too, it is well to remember, seemed in his own day, seemed even to Johnson, obscure) or it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things, ideal from their very birth. Rossetti did something, something excellent, of the former kind; but his characteristic, his really revealing work, lay in the adding to poetry of fresh poetic material, of a new order of phenomena, in the creation of a new ideal.[12]

Critical assessment[]

The popularity, frequent reproduction, and general availability of Rossetti's later paintings of women have led to association with "a morbid and langourous sensuality"[13] His small-scale early works and drawings are less well known, but it is in these that his originality, technical inventiveness, and significance in the movement away from Academic tradition can best be seen.[14] As Roger Fry wrote in 1916, "Rossetti more than any other artist since Blake may be hailed as a forerunner of the new ideas" in English Art.[15]

Recognition[]

His poem "The Blessed Damozel" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.[16]

All the extant pictorial likenesses of Rossetti, mostly by himself, have been published by his brother in various places. One of these of himself, aged 18, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. No portrait so accurately represents him as the photograph by W. and E. Downey, prefixed to Mr. Hall Caine's ‘Recollections.’ A posthumous bust was sculptured by Madox Brown for a memorial fountain placed opposite Rossetti's house in Cheyne Walk. Another portrait was painted by G. F. Watts, R.A. A drawing by Rossetti of his wife belongs to Mr. Barclay Squire. Exhibitions of his pictures have been held by the Royal Academy and by the Arts Club. His poetical works have been published more than once in a complete form since his death.[10]

Collections[]

The National Gallery acquired in 1886 his oil-painting ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ (1850), in which his sister Christina sat for the Virgin. His ‘Dante's Dream’ (1869–71) is in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool.[10]

Tate Britain, Birmingham, Manchester, and Salford Museum and Art Galleries all contain large collections of Rossetti's work; the latter was bequeathed a number of works following the death of L.S. Lowry in 1976. Lowry was president of the Newcastle-based 'Rossetti Society', which was founded in 1966.[17] Lowry's private collection of works was chiefly built around Rossetti's paintings and sketches of Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris, and notable pieces included Pandora, Proserpine and a drawing of Annie Miller. In an interview with Mervyn Levy, Lowry explained his fascination with the Rossetti women in relation to his own work: "I don't like his women at all, but they fascinate me, like a snake. That's why I always buy Rossetti whenever I can. His women are really rather horrible. It's like a friend of mine who says he hates my work, although it fascinates him."[18] The friend Lowry referred to was businessman Monty Bloom, to whom he also explained his obsession with Rossetti's portraits: "They are not real women [...] They are dreams [...] He used them for something in his mind caused by the death of his wife. I may be quite wrong there, but significantly they all came after the death of his wife."[19]

In popular culture[]

Rossetti was played by Oliver Reed in Ken Russell's film Dante's Inferno (1967). The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as a whole have been the subjects of 2 BBC period dramas: The Love School (1975), starring Ben Kingsley as Rossetti; and Desperate Romantics, in which Rossetti is played by Aidan Turner, broadcast on BBC 2 on Tuesday, 21 July 2009.[20]

Publications[]

Poemstrans18501800ross 0001

Poetry[]

  • Sir Hugh the Heron. London: privately printed by G. Polidori, 1843.
  • Poems. London: Ellis, 1870; 2nd, 3rd, 4th edition, 1870; 5th edition, 1871; 6th edition, 1872;
    • published in U.S. as Poems. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1870.
  • Love–Lily, and other songs (by Rossetti and Edward Dannreuther). London: Novello, Ewer, 1877.[21]
  • Poems: A new edition. London: Strangeways, 1881. London: Ellis & White, 1881.
  • Ballads and Sonnets. London: Ellis, 1881.
Posthumous

Short fiction[]

  • Hand and Soul. London: privately printed by Strangeways & Walden, 1869.

Translated[]

Collected editions[]

  • Collected Works (edited by William Michael Rossetti). (2 volumes). London: Ellis & Elvey, 1890. Volume I; Volume II.
  • Collected Writings (edited by Jan Marsh}. Chicago: New Amsterdam, 2000.
  • Collected Poetry and Prose (edited by Jerome J. McGann). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Letters[]

  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His family-letters (edited by William G. Rossetti). (2 volumes), London: Ellis & Elvey, 1895; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895.
    • New York: AMS Press, 1970.
  • Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854-1870 (edited by George Birkbeck Norman Hill). London: T.F. Unwin, 1897.
  • The Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to his Publisher, F.S. Ellis (edited by Oswald Doughty). London: Scholartis Press, 1928.
  • Letters (edited by Oswald Doughty & John Robert Wahl). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Volume I: 1835-1860, 1965; Volume II: 1861-1870, 1965; Volume III: 1871-1876, 1967; Volume IV: 1877-1882, 1967.
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their correspondence (edited by John Bryson). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1976.
  • Dear Mr. Rossetti: The correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Hall Caine, 1878-1881 (edited by Vivien Allen). Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.
  • 'Correspondence: The formative years, 1835-1862 (edited by William E. Fredeman). Cambridge, UK, & Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2002.[22] Volume I: 1835-1854; Volume II: 1855-1862.
    • The chelsea years, 1863-1872 (edited by William E. Fredeman). Volume II: prelude to crisis, 1863-1867, 2003.


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[22]

The_Blessed_Damozel_-_Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti

The Blessed Damozel - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A_Little_While_by_Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti

A Little While by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Jenny_by_Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_(1870)_-_read_by_Charlotte_Rose_Wright

Jenny by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1870) - read by Charlotte Rose Wright

Body's_Beauty_-_Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti

Body's Beauty - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti[]

  1. The Blessed Damozel

See also[]

References[]

  • Russell Ash, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Pavilion Books ISBN 978-1857934120; New York: Abrams, 1995. ISBN 978-1857939507.
  • Doughty, Oswald, A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti London: Frederick Muller, 1949.
  • Fredeman, William E. (1971). Prelude to the last decade: Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the summer of 1872. Manchester [Eng.]: The John Rylands Library.
  • Fredeman, William E. (Ed.) (2002-8) The correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 7 Vols. Brewer, Cambridge.
  • PD-icon Garnett, Richard (1897) "Rossetti, Dante Gabriel" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 49 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 284-289  Web,Feb. 24, 2021.
  • Hilto, Timoth (1970). The Pre-Raphelites. London: Thames and Hudson, New York: Abrams.
  • Marsh, Jan (1996). The Pre-Raphaelites: Their Lives in Letters and Diaries. London: Collins & Brown.
  • McGann, J.J. (2000). Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the game that must be lost. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Parry, Linda (1996), ed., William Morris. New York: Abrams, ISBN 0-8109-4282-8.
  • Rohde, Shelley, (2000) L.S. Lowry: A Biography; Lowry Press, Salford Quays
  • Simons, J. (2008). Rossetti's Wombat: Pre-Raphaelites and Australian animals in Victorian London. London: Middlesex University Press.
  • Treuherz, Julian, Prettejohn, Elizabeth, and Becker, Edwin (2003). Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Thames & Hudson, ISBN 0500093164.
  • Todd, Pamela (2001). Pre-Raphaelites at Home, New York: Watson-Giptill Publications, ISBN 0823042855.

Notes[]

  1. John William Cousin, "Rossetti, Dante Gabriel," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1910, 322. Wikisource, Web, Feb. 23, 2018.
  2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A hypermedia archive, The Rossetti Archive, Web, Oct. 13, 2012.
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Garnett, 284.
  4. 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Garnett, 285.
  5. 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 Garnett, 286.
  6. 6.0 6.1 6.2 Treuherz et al. (2003), p. 52-54
  7. Treuherz et al. (2003), p. 64
  8. 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 Garnett, 287.
  9. 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 Garnett, 288.
  10. 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Garnett, 289.
  11. Todd (2001), pp. 128-129
  12. from Walter Pater, "Critical Introduction: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)," The English Poets: Selections with critical introductions (edited by Thomas Humphry Ward). New York & London: Macmillan, 1880-1918. Web, Mar. 20, 2016.
  13. Treuherz et al. (2003), p. 12
  14. Treuherz et al. (2003), 16.
  15. Quoted in Treuherz et al. (2003), 12.
  16. "The Blessed Damozel". Arthur Quiller-Couch, editor, Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1919). Bartleby.com, Web, May 6, 2012.
  17. Rohde (2000). p.396
  18. Rohde (2000), p.276
  19. Rohde (2000) p.276
  20. "BBC Desperate Romantics". http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/08_august/07/romantics.shtml. 
  21. Rossetti Archive Bibliography, Rossetti Archive, Web, Oct. 13, 2012.
  22. 22.0 22.1 Search results = au:Dante Gabriel Rossetti, WorldCat, OClC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Nov. 3, 2013.

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PD-icon This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Rossetti, Dante Gabriel

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