The Pre-Raphaelites

The past three years have witnessed a resurgence of critical attention to Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Jan Marsh published her fine critical biography Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet in 1999; Jerome McGann and others offered a first installment of their electronic Rossetti archive in 2000 (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu:1828); and St. John's College, Cambridge hosted a comprehensive conference on "The Rossettis: Victorian Cosmopolitans in London" in July 2001.

McGann has now published Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Game That Must Be Lost, the most extensive study of Rossetti's poetry since David Riede's Dante Gabriel Rossetti Revisited appeared in 1992. In its introduction, he defends Rossetti's poems and paintings as heritors of a late romantic tradition which "began and ended . . . as the quest for an art and a literature that was no longer possible" ("that must be lost") (p. xiv), noble efforts to "demonstrate the sensuous operations of intelligence" (p. xv), and quasi-philosophical exemplars of "forms of truth unfounded by any myth of enlightenment" (p. xvii). In subsequent chapters he develops these assertions through a variety of reprises into an extended meditation on the somber tonalities of Rossetti's art and poetry.

In "A Dynamic of Reflection," the book's first chapter, McGann responds to modernist critiques that Rossetti was "in one perspective . . . too romantic and idiosyncratic, [and] in another . . . mired in inherited conventions" (p. 3), with a defense of his recurrent preoccupations with the "cognitive nature of immediated sensual perception" (p. 7), his desires to preserve an "inner standing point," his awareness of the recessive and reflective questions of "images [which] call out to images" (p. 23), and his deeply un-Morrisian citadin-sensibilities ("uninterested and unimpressed with the country God made, he wanted the Man-made town" [p. 5]).

In the second and third chapters ("Intelligence in Love: Medieval v. Victorian v. Modern" and "Dante and Rossetti: Translation, Pastiche, Ritual, Fate"), McGann considers Rossetti's theories of translation, sacral views of art, and reception of Dante and other medieval sources. In "Intelligence in Love," framed as an argument against T. S. Eliot's hostile view of Rossetti's art, he argues that "apparent excess of detail" in Rossetti's early painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and his poems on paintings guided the viewer toward aesthetic reformulations of the painting's ostensible subject, manifested the painting's "fundamental brainwork," and created a "hyperrealism that anticipate[d] certain Post-modern styles" (p. 32).

As he interprets Rossetti's translations of the Vita Nuova, moreover, Rossetti conceived the Beatrice-ideal in terms that were "religious in tone but skeptical in . . . understanding" (p. 43), for "Dante's ideological horizon translated Beatrice into elaborate conceptual equivalents [, but] Rossetti took all the equivalents at face value. They [were] for him decorative additions to the central (artistic) event: not truths but forms of truth" (p. 36). He also reviews Pater's views that Rossetti's poetry manifested originality of vocabulary, "genuine intellectual structure," forms of (de facto proto-modernist) self-consciousness, and "mythopoeic" evocations of the past which manifested "the ideal aspects of common things."

In chapter 3, "Dante and Rossetti," McGann identifies certain debts to the Italian stilnovista, among them Rossetti's "screen"-like use of displacements and personifications, cultivation of artifice and "impersonal rhetoric" (p. 48), and ambiguities of reference which expressed "magical ideas of art and language" (p. 59). As an instance of the latter, he traces out a pointed biographical application of bleak lines inscribed in a manuscript begun in 1848 and buried with Elizabeth Siddal in 1862, which William Michael Rossetti published as "Another Love" and "Praise and Prayer" in 1898 and 1911--"I could not thank / God for the cup of evil that I drank: / . . . And so I sank / Into the furnished phrases smooth and blank / Which we all learn in childhood." McGann views these as uncanny anticipations of "a sudden death [which] turned these poetic exercises of 1848 [into] prophetic poems about his...