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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.

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.

This chapter places Lawrence’s poetics, as developed in his poetry, in relation to his responses to other poets and poetic tendencies or movements, such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Symbolism and Aestheticism as well as contemporary free verse, Realism and Imagism. Lawrence knew and corresponded with many poets throughout his career, from Yeats and Pound to Amy Lowell and H. D. The extent to which he assimilated or resisted such diverse influences is the focus of this re-evaluation of Lawrence’s paradoxical status as an outsider inside. His poetics elude simple definition. So dissimilar are the kinds of verse to which Lawrence responded that his general openness to old and new voices, alike, helps account not only for this maverick status, but for the sheer variety of verse forms practiced in his poetry. Through the poetry of Whitman, Lawrence recovered the sense of ‘wonder’ that he had felt as a child hearing the Bible and listening to church hymns. Poetry also became a form of play. He soon discovered, too, how much work, or ‘groping’, was entailed in writing and resisted falsifying perfection. Double-edged, the ‘jagged’ edges perceived by Conrad Aiken became a signature trait. Dialectical and conflictual relationalism inflects his Whitmanesque style.

This chapter discusses the history of The Germ, the official magazine of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The magazine was the brainchild of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; its editor and chronicler was William Michael Rossetti while other members of the Brotherhood, Holman Hunt and James Collinson, were contributors and part-owners. Its brief run from January to April 1850 was attributed to a lack of financial acumen, recriminations and rivalry amongst its members, and loss of interest as the work of the individuals involved moved off in different directions. However, The Germ is recognized for significant contributions by the Rossettis, Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Woolner, and others. It was also republished twice by the turn of the century as Pre-Raphaelitism gained popularity and copies of the magazine acquired a rising monetary value.

Rossetti’s involvement with the Pre-Raphaelites transformed her perception of the visible and invisible world, shaping her Christological and ecological reading of all things as part of one body. While critics have acknowledged her relationship with Pre-Raphaelitism, its influence has often been separated from her faith. This chapter suggests, however, that Rossetti’s reading of an early Pre-Raphaelite affinity with what Dante Gabriel Rossetti called an ‘art-Catholic’ helped found her nondual understanding of creation as embracing both the material and the divine, and that her vision of an interconnected creation evolved in this period in her encounters with Plato, Gregory of Nyssa, Francis of Assisi, and William Blake. Through a series of close readings of her earliest published poetry, including ‘Goblin Market’, and contributions to the Pre-Raphaelite periodical The Germ, the chapter relates her communal and participatory vision of creation to a form of kinship modelled in the Sermon on the Mount.