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 Some
of you must wonder how we identify the subjects I pick for these
weekly messages. In some cases, of course, it’s obvious: there
is a celebration of some event, or it’s the first day of Spring.
However, the rest of the topics arise from suggestions from various
people. I would really like to hear ideas from those of you who
read these columns!
This week, the suggestion came from the Editor in Chief of The
Mediadrome, so obviously I pay careful attention. However, it
also fits very well with last week’s column.
“Why not write about the Pre-Raphaelites?” she said. Now, at
first sight, this may seem odd: the Pre-Raphaelites are usually
thought of in terms of their contributions to visual arts: they
were primarily a group of young British painters, who in 1848
mounted a protest against what they regarded as the unimaginative
and artificial historical painting favored by the Royal Academy.
They sought to express a new moral seriousness and sincerity in
their work. They admired the direct and uncomplicated depiction
of nature in Italian painting before the High Renaissance, and
for this reason called themselves “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”.
The leaders were William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Brotherhood itself lasted only about
ten years, but their influence was profound.
Now, in addition to their contributions to painting, they functioned
as a school of writers who linked the incipient Aestheticism of
John Keats (1795 – 1821) and Thomas De Quincey (1785 – 1859) and
the fin de siècle Decadent movement, which was initiated
in France by Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867), Stéphane
Mallarmé (1842 – 1898) and Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896);
this led to the work of Jules Laforgue (1860 – 1887), who was
one of the first advocates of vers libre, and a major influence
for T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965). In England, the Decadent movement
attracted Arthur William Symons (1865 – 1945), Oscar Wilde (1854
– 1900), Ernest Dowson (1867 – 1900), and Lionel Johnson (1867
– 1902). Actually, in 1888 the Rhymers’ Club which was based at
Oxford contained a number of the Decadents, and William Butler
Yeats (1865 - 1939) and Aubrey Beardsley (1872 - 1898) were also
members and involved in this movement.
 However,
the key figure in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for this aspect
was Dante Gabriel Rossetti (actually christened Gabriel Charles
Dante Rossetti) (1828 – 1882).
He was a member of a remarkable family. Hs father was Gabriele
Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti (1783 – 1854) who was born near Naples.
He was a poet, revolutionary, and a scholar. He studied at the
University of Naples, and in 1807 was a librettist at the San
Carlo opera house in Naples; later he was appointed curator of
a Naples museum. He was also a member of the revolutionary society
Carbonari, and received a sentence of death from Ferdinand
II, the tyrant king of Naples. He escaped to England via Malta
in 1824. In 1826, he married Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, who
was herself the daughter of a distinguished Italian poet and man
of letters. In 1831, he was appointed Professor of Italian at
King’s College, London, a post he held until 1847.
Interestingly, Frances’s uncle was Dr. John Polidori (1795 –
1821). He was one of the youngest people ever to qualify in medicine:
he was just 19. However, he is now best remembered as having been
a friend of Lord Byron’s. He accompanied him as his personal physician
on Byron’s famous trip to Europe in 1816; Polidori was part of
the group who stayed at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake
Geneva during the wet summer of that year with Percy Shelley and
Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley, where Byron challenged them all to
write a ghost story. Mary wrote Frankenstein; and in April
1819 the New Monthly Magazine contained a story entitled
The Vampyre, whose authorship was rather vague. It was
at first attributed to Byron, but it turns out that it was written
by Polidori, although apparently based on a concept of Byron’s.
By the end of that summer Byron and Polidori parted on very bad
terms.
The Rossettis had four children, all of whom were outstanding.
For our purposes here the two of consequence were Dante Gabriel,
and Christina Georgina (1830 – 1894). Christina wrote her early
work under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne.
 Dante
Gabriel Rossetti was translating Italian poets by the time he
was 20. He was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown (1821 – 1893) and the
story has it that the young Rossetti, very keen to become his
apprentice, wrote him such an effusive letter that Madox Brown
felt he was being made a fool of, found a large stick, and went
to seek the younger man with violence in mind. On their meeting,
however, Madox Brown was convinced of the genuine enthusiasm of
Rossetti, and became first his tutor and then lifelong friend.
Madox Brown sympathized closely with the Pre-Raphaelites, although
he was never formally one of the brotherhood. Later in life, he
said of them:
“Strictly speaking, I was not one of them. I was somewhat older
than them at the time, and I disavowed certain of their tenets.
Before meeting them I had already in Paris resolved on a system
of individualized and truer light and shade... about this time
also I had an attraction towards Holbein, after being once chiefly
swayed by Rembrandt. On my meeting the Pre-Raphaelites, I shared
their feeling for intense and brilliant colour.”
Rossetti linked poetry, painting, and social idealism. He began
to use subtle treatments of contemporary life with a new kind
of medievalism, and after 1856 he was greatly influenced by Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King, (1859) which we mentioned last week,
and also the version of the Arthurian legend in Sir Thomas Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur, which dates from about 1470.
Another major influence in this development was The Defence
of Guenevere (1858) by William Morris (1834 – 1896). Morris
entered Exeter College, Oxford in 1853 and took his degree in
1856. In that same year, he financed the first 12 monthly issues
of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, in which he published
many of the poems that were later reprinted as The Defence
of Guenevere. The poem he is best remembered for is probably
Life and Death of Jason, published in 1867. He continued
to make important contributions, certainly up to News from
Nowhere, published in 1890.
Another significant influence was Algernon Charles Swinburne
(1837 – 1909), notably his verse drama Atalanta in Calydon
(1865), which was an attempt to re-create in English the form
and spirit of Greek tragedy. In 1866 he published the first series
of Poems and Ballads, which included The Garden of Proserpine,
which we have referred to in an earlier column in this series.
Rossetti’s first collection of poetry was The Blessed Damozel,
with six sonnets and four lyrics, published in 1850 in The
Germ, the Pre-Raphaelite periodical. In 1861 he enjoyed a
modest success with his published translations, The Early Italian
Poets. In May, 1860, he married Elizabeth Siddal (1829 – 1862)
who had first worked with the Pre-Raphaelites as a model. She
became an artist and a poet herself, receiving sponsorship from
John Ruskin; and her first exhibition was in 1857. Following a
stillborn daughter in 1860, she suffered from postnatal depression,
and died of a laudanum overdose in February 1862. Rossetti buried
the only complete manuscript of his poems with her. They were
recovered later, and published in 1870. His later publications
included Ballads and Sonnets (1881), which contained the
sonnet sequence The House of Life.
 Christina
Rossetti was also a remarkable person, and remains one of the
most important English women poets in both the range and quality
of her work. Her first book of poetry was printed privately in
1847; in 1850 she contributed seven poems to The Germ.
In 1853, when the family was in financial trouble, she helped
her mother keep a school in Frome, Somerset, but it was not a
success. In 1854 they returned to London, and in April her father
died. Christina then entered into what became her life work: companionship
to her mother, devotion to her religion, and the writing of poetry.
She was a High Church Anglican, and in 1859 she broke off her
engagement to the artist James Collinson, an original member of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, because he had become a Roman
Catholic. For similar reasons she rejected Charles Bagot Cayley
in 1864, although they remained close friends. Her mother died
in 1886.
In 1862 Christina published Goblin Market and Other
Poems, and in 1866 The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems,
both illustrated by her brother. She was stricken with Graves’
disease, a thyroid disorder, in 1871. After this, while she did
continue to write and publish some poetry, most of her output
was devotional prose. She was considered a possible successor
to Alfred, Lord Tennyson as Poet Laureate; but developed a fatal
cancer in 1891 and died in December of 1894. Dante Gabriel’s poetry
evolved towards the Decadent model, but Christina’s remained close
to the original Pre-Raphaelite ideals throughout her life. Merriam-Webster’s
Encyclopedia of Literature says:
“Part of [her] success as a poet arises from her ability to
unite the devotional and the passionate sides of her nature.
Her weaker verse is sometimes sentimental and didactic, but
at its best her poetry is strong, personal, and unforced, with
a metrical cadence that is unmistakably her own. The transience
of material things is a theme that recurs throughout her poetry,
and the resigned but passionate sadness of unhappy love is often
a dominant note.”
 So,
how do we select three works to represent this important part
of English Victorian poetry? I think we have to start with Dante
Gabriel Rossetti’s The
Blessed Damozel, because it was really the first of the
Pre-Raphaelite poems, and certainly contains many of the elements
that are mirrored in the paintings. Rossetti modified the text
of this poem several times; the version I have used here is that
from The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856). The second
poem I have used is William Morris’s The
Defence of Guenevere, again because of its historical
relevance to the movement. My last poem of the week is, of course,
from Christina Rossetti. The selection here is more difficult,
but again I have decided to make the historical choice, and pick
Goblin
Market.
So there you are. An important and interesting, if transitional,
period in English poetry; a truly remarkable cast of characters;
and some interesting poems. I’d like to finish by quoting one
of Elizabeth Siddal’s poems, because one way and another I think
history has been a bit unkind to her. This is The Lust of the
Eyes:
I care not for my Lady’s soul
Though I worship before her smile;
I care not where be my Lady’s goal
When her beauty shall lose its wile.
Low sit I down at my Lady’s feet
Gazing through her wild eyes
Smiling to think how my love will fleet
When their starlike beauty dies.
I care not if my Lady pray
To our Father which is in Heaven
But for joy my heart’s quick pulses play
For to me her love is given.
Then who shall close my Lady’s eyes
And who shall fold her hands?
Will any hearken if she cries
Up to the unknown lands.
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