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Christina Rossetti’s Poems: a New Edition and a Revaluation

Jerome J. McGann

in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory

This chapter considers the works of Christina Rossetti. Rossetti presents a peculiarly useful subject through which to explore how certain writers move in or out of critical attention. In addition, ... More

This chapter considers the works of Christina Rossetti. Rossetti presents a peculiarly useful subject through which to explore how certain writers move in or out of critical attention. In addition, her religious poetry offers a testing ground in which to work out a methodology of stylistic periodization. Because Christian poems, especially in the Anglican and Anglo–Catholic tradition, preserve a more or less stable ideology between the 16th and the early 20th centuries, their period-specific characteristics can be more readily isolated and studied. Anyone who has studied Christina Rossetti knows the frusatration of working with the hitherto ‘standard’ collection of her poems edited by her brother William Michael Rossetti. Meanwhile, her poetry takes up an ideological position which is far more radical than the middle-class feminist positions current in her epoch. The principal factor which enabled her to overleap those positions was her severe Christianity.Less

The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti

Jerome J. McGann

in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory

One of the difficulties which an explicitly Christian poem, or artwork, presents for criticism is its appearance of thematic uniformity. Readers of such a poem frequently seem to think that the ideas ... More

One of the difficulties which an explicitly Christian poem, or artwork, presents for criticism is its appearance of thematic uniformity. Readers of such a poem frequently seem to think that the ideas are transcendent rather than historically particular. The enormous revival of interest in Christian and even Catholic poetry which began in the Modern Period and which flourished with New Criticism did not take any serious account of the work of Christina Rossetti. This chapter asks why is it that not a single critic associated with the New Critical movement ever wrote anything about Christina Rossetti. Fortunately, the ultimate marginality of Rossetti 's particular Christian stance was to become the source of its final strength, the privilege of its historical backwardness.Less

Consumers of Intoxicating Fruits and Elixirs: The Cognitive Grammar of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford Madox Ford’s Oriental Fairy Tales

Eleonora Sasso

in The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East

The fourth chapter provides a cognitive grammar analysis of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford’s Oriental fairy poetry and narrative fictionalising scenes of drug consumption. Like consumers of banj ... More

The fourth chapter provides a cognitive grammar analysis of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford’s Oriental fairy poetry and narrative fictionalising scenes of drug consumption. Like consumers of banj (hashish) and opium, Rossetti’s and Ford’s characters (the petrified banqueters, Laura, the princess wearing poppies, Queen Eldrida, Princess Ismara and the blind ploughman) experience moments of hallucination caused by intoxicating fruits, elixirs of life and infusions of wind-flowers. Probably written in reaction to the Opium War, which facilitated the diffusion of opium-based laudanum, used for recreational purposes and health remedies, Rossetti’s ‘The Dead City’, ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘The Prince’s Progress’, as well as Ford’s The Brown Owl (1892), The Feather (1892) and The Queen Who Flew blend together parts of Oriental narratives in order to visualise the temptations of the East.Less

Christina Rossetti and the Triumph of Revision

Constance W. Hassett

in Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts

Christina Rossetti is well known for subjecting her poems to what Jerome McGann calls ‘severe prunings’, the most conspicuous of her strategies for achieving her characteristically spare lyricism. ... More

Christina Rossetti is well known for subjecting her poems to what Jerome McGann calls ‘severe prunings’, the most conspicuous of her strategies for achieving her characteristically spare lyricism. She isolates the two stanzas of ‘Bitter for Sweet’ from a longer draft; she retrieves the two stanzas of ‘The Bourne’ from a shapeless 12-stanza poem. The extant Rossetti Notebooks, now at the Bodleian and the British Libraries, reveal intensely careful work—an adroit verbal change here, a rhythmic adjustment there—on the poems that eventually appear in Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince’s Progress (1866). For Rossetti, a manuscript ‘fair copy’ seldom remains pristine. The revisions to a poem such as ‘My Dream’ show that the deft revision that produces Rossettian understatement in her poems also produces their fine exuberance.Less

Like honey to the throat but poison to the blood: Christina Rossetti's addictive market

in Labyrinths of Deceit: Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

Christina Rossetti's poem ‘Goblin Market’ is a powerful account of threshold states and addiction. In it one can find emblems of dislocation such as ghosts and spectres. David F. Morrill points out ... More

Christina Rossetti's poem ‘Goblin Market’ is a powerful account of threshold states and addiction. In it one can find emblems of dislocation such as ghosts and spectres. David F. Morrill points out the apparent connections between ‘Goblin Market’ and John Polidori's 1819 vampire novel The Vampyre. Rossetti's poem has many characteristics that fulfil the vampiric criteria suggested by Morrill, such as the explicit representation of intoxication and the transgressive consumption of forbidden fruits. It also reconfigures the notion of addiction in a series of shifting formations, from vampirism to prostitution, contagion, and purchasing power, all of which problematise a unified sense of identity.Less

The Poetics of Popular Poetry in the Argosy

Caley Ehnes

in Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical

This chapter focuses on the poetics of popular poetry in the Argosy under the editorship of Isa Craig. It argues that a careful reading of the periodical’s sentimental poetry challenges the critical ... More

This chapter focuses on the poetics of popular poetry in the Argosy under the editorship of Isa Craig. It argues that a careful reading of the periodical’s sentimental poetry challenges the critical dismissal of such light, entertaining verse as simplistic, marginal, and trite. In particular, it considers how the periodical poems of Christina Rossetti, Isa Craig, Jean Ingelow and Sarah Williams test as well as champion the conventions of the sentimental lyric form to produce a new poetics, one defined both through and against conventional representations of the Victorian poetess and her gushing, heart-inspired poetry. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that evaluating the poems of the Argosy on their own merits as poetic forms produced as part of the era’s complex, interconnected literary culture provides a way to discuss sentimental poetry and female poets without falling back on the defensive and sometimes dismissive language found in much of the critical work published on women’s popular poetry.Less

Christina Rossetti’s Chronometrical Eternal

Krista Lysack

in Chronometres: Devotional Literature, Duration, and Victorian Reading

This chapter takes up one of The Christian Year’s most provocative interpolators, Christina Rossetti. Examining her devotional books, it makes a particular study of Time Flies: A Reading Diary, a ... More

This chapter takes up one of The Christian Year’s most provocative interpolators, Christina Rossetti. Examining her devotional books, it makes a particular study of Time Flies: A Reading Diary, a miscellany of daily reading that combines lyric poetry and prose meditations. In Time Flies: A Reading Diary, Rossetti embraces the apparent synchronizations of liturgical and clock time that Keble’s volume implies. Among the time signatures that Rossetti tries on, in addition to the more familiar ones of liturgical time, are ones shaped through the possibilities of the quotidian. Time Flies playfully reveals how heterotopic or “eternal” time is produced through a material relation with the book as diurnal reading/writing object.Less

The Solo’s Origins: Monodramas, Attitudes, Dramatic Monologues

Carrie J. Preston

in Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance

This chapter discovers an origin for modernist solos in popular performance forms emerging from romanticism—monodramas and attitudes usually presented a mythic character in an emotionally climactic ... More

This chapter discovers an origin for modernist solos in popular performance forms emerging from romanticism—monodramas and attitudes usually presented a mythic character in an emotionally climactic scene. These nineteenth-century solos posed a complex version of gendered subjectivity, a protomodernist subject figured as a momentary coherence in different possibilities of movement, speech, and character. Combined with classicism and the ancient Christian hermeneutic of biblical typology or the fourfold method, monodramas and attitudes contributed to the development of the Victorian dramatic monologue. Poems spoken by mythic types exhibit a tension between their foundation in classical and Christian ethics and an impulse to revise entrenched narratives. The analysis covers Rousseau's Pygmalion, the attitudes of Emma Lyon Hamilton, Goethe's Proserpina and later posers, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “Aeschylus” and “The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus”, and the works of Christina Rossetti and Augusta Webster.Less

The New Shilling Monthlies: Macmillan’s Magazine and The Cornhill

Caley Ehnes

in Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical

This chapter turns its attention to the shilling monthly as represented by the originators of the genre: Macmillan’sMagazine and the Cornhill. These periodicals represent a particular moment in ... More

This chapter turns its attention to the shilling monthly as represented by the originators of the genre: Macmillan’sMagazine and the Cornhill. These periodicals represent a particular moment in literary history in which the shilling monthly explicitly functioned to reinforce and define middle-class cultural tastes and traditions. This chapter thus considers how the editors of Macmillan’s and the Cornhill used poetry to support the cultural and literary aims of their respective periodicals, shaping the poetic landscape of the 1860s through their editorial decisions (e.g. each periodical took a side in the era’s debate over hexameters). The first third of the chapter traces Alexander Macmillan’s influence on the poetry of Macmillan’s through the work of Alfred Tennyson, Dinah Mulock Craik, and Christina Rossetti. The remainder of the chapter focuses on William Thackeray’s role as paterfamilias of the Cornhill through an examination of poems by Matthew Arnold, Adelaide Anne Procter, Owen Meredith, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (among others).Less

Siddal, Christina Rossetti and the literary context

Anne Woolley

in The poems of Elizabeth Siddal in context

Keeping attention firmly away from her life history, the introduction presents an overview of Siddal’s enigmatic, timeless and introspective poems, their condition and their Pre-Raphaelite context, ... More

Keeping attention firmly away from her life history, the introduction presents an overview of Siddal’s enigmatic, timeless and introspective poems, their condition and their Pre-Raphaelite context, and argues for the inclusion of male poets when undertaking critical analysis of a female counterpart. An outline of the argument of each chapter is given, built around a rationale for the inclusion of Rossetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, Ruskin and Keats and the specific cultural and political contexts they suggest. The intertextual analysis undertaken is shown to be of mutual benefit, contexts providing an interpretative platform even when the poems themselves are very different. The generic nature of feminist poetry is considered before the focus turns to the more specific question of ‘lost’ nineteenth-century female voices, notably Hemans and Landon (L. E. L.), their retrieval and revival. Christina Rossetti is put forward as Siddal’s most significant literary contemporary and their poetics compared. The importance of Siddal’s artwork in the elucidation and evaluation of poems seemingly written in secret and full of dualisms and paradox is explained, paving the way for a new multi-faceted appraisal of her writing.Less

The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine

Koenraad Claes

in The Late-Victorian Little Magazine

This chapter offers a working definition for the little magazine genre, explained as dependent on the peculiar position these publications occupied in the wider periodical marketplace. It then looks ... More

This chapter offers a working definition for the little magazine genre, explained as dependent on the peculiar position these publications occupied in the wider periodical marketplace. It then looks at two titles that have been suggested as the starting point for this genre: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s journal TheGerm (1850—e.g. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Holman Hunt), and the closely linked Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856—e.g. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones) that anticipates the message of the Arts & Crafts Movement, in which several contributors would be involved. Finally, the early tendencies in these journals towards a conceptual integration of their contents and the formal / material aspects of the printed text is related to the mid- to late-Victorian ‘Revival of Fine Printing’, which is argued to develop alongside the little magazine genre.Less

Hopkins and the Lost Beloved: The Making of ‘A Voice from the World’ and ‘Binsey Poplars’

Catherine Phillips

in Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts

This chapter examines the development of two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins: the first, ‘A Voice from the World’, was written as a response to Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Convent Threshold’ and Dante ... More

This chapter examines the development of two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins: the first, ‘A Voice from the World’, was written as a response to Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Convent Threshold’ and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’. The extant fragments of Hopkins’s poem suggest his undergraduate poetic ambition to rival the Rossettis in tackling metrical and emotional complexities. The second poem examined is ‘Binsey Poplars’, which belongs to 1879, when Hopkins was a parish priest in Oxford. In it Hopkins struggles to express deep feelings about the destruction of nature, absorbing ideas from poems written by his father, R. W. Dixon, and John Clare. ‘Binsey Poplars’ is also of interest at present because a new holograph, with unique readings, has recently been purchased at auction by the Bodleian. In examining both poems, the chapter explores the concatenation of sources of inspiration and something of Hopkins’s development in handling emotional subjects.Less

Other Poetry

George Meredith

in Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads

This chapter takes a break from the study and examination of the form and content of mid-Victorian poetry. Instead, it compiles poems that exemplify key elements of Meredith's verse: social ... More

This chapter takes a break from the study and examination of the form and content of mid-Victorian poetry. Instead, it compiles poems that exemplify key elements of Meredith's verse: social commentary, sensory detail and synesthesia, narrativity, and the sonnet form. The chapter looks at poems such as Coventry Patmore's “The Angel in the House” or Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti's sonnets in order to identify certain similarities and patterns that emerge and are linked with Meredith's poetics. As is evident from the previous chapters, “Modern Love” takes inspiration from the traditional sonnet form, but also challenges and experiments with its form, thus turning it into something more modern. The chapter furthermore compares the steps and structures that each of these poets used in their composition of their sonnets, and how each one influenced the other.Less

Invariant Forms: “[T]he bonds of verse”: Form as Discipline

Andrea Henderson

in Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture

In the later nineteenth century formal regularity was regarded as the hallmark of mathematical and scientific inquiry as well as the burgeoning “social sciences” and the arts—all presumed to be ... More

In the later nineteenth century formal regularity was regarded as the hallmark of mathematical and scientific inquiry as well as the burgeoning “social sciences” and the arts—all presumed to be governed by formal “laws.” But insofar as formal regularity was seen to characterize natural and civil law, it allowed for an equivocation between them, such that formal laws might be understood to be not an abstraction from but an imposition on content. Thus conceived, form and content could actually be at odds, and this would have important implications for the arts. In the context of linguistic and literary study, the structures of languages and literatures were often allied with formal law while individual words were perceived as rich in meaning but wayward. Max Müller’s philology, Coventry Patmore’s prosody and poetry, and Christina Rossetti’s poetry all present form and content as being in tension, locked in a struggle for domination.Less

Poetry in the Making: Introduction

Daniel Tyler

in Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts

The introduction to the volume proposes that composition is a dynamic process and that ideas of effortful labour and sudden inspiration are equally suggestive as ways to understand (or experience) ... More

The introduction to the volume proposes that composition is a dynamic process and that ideas of effortful labour and sudden inspiration are equally suggestive as ways to understand (or experience) the process of composition. The chapter argues that it is necessary to understand (and recover) the dynamics of composition, a process that is concealed when changes of mind and swerves of thought and expression, are flattened out into editorial lists of variants. The verbal adjustments to draft poems that the period’s poetic manuscripts reveal again and again, testify to the careful attention to wording by these poets in the process of composition and they demonstrate the scale of attention that the poems reward for readers and critics. This introductory chapter and the chapters that follow take up this invitation to respond to poems with careful regard for their verbal textures alongside other structural, technical and thematic qualities. This chapter offers a case and a methodology for reading draft poetic manuscripts for literary-critical ends.Less

Confronting Variety: Listing, Subjectivity, and Genre in Latin Poetry

William Fitzgerald

in Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept

Starting with Horace’s lengthy priamel in the first of his odes, this chapter looks at the relation between subjectivity and variety through the phenomenon of listing as it appears in different ... More

Starting with Horace’s lengthy priamel in the first of his odes, this chapter looks at the relation between subjectivity and variety through the phenomenon of listing as it appears in different genres of Latin poetry. The chapter establishes distinctions and connections between the listing subject in lyric, love poetry, satire and panegyric. Particular attention is paid to the tendency of lists to be ambiguous between variety and sameness and to the possibility that the speaking subject may be absorbed into the variety he confronts.Less