Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (review)

Elizabeth Helsinger's fascinating Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts focuses on the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, the two most influential instigators of Pre Raphaelitism in its second phase. The chief virtue of her study is that she looks at the work of both artists in its totality, considering the verbal and visual aspects in close mutual relation. Her considerable skills as a close reader of literary texts reap substantial rewards when applied to paintings and decorative objects, and she reveals hitherto unappreciated continuities and relationships between texts and material objects that enhance our understanding of both. Her monograph is an invaluable contribution to the small but steady flow of high-quality publications that in recent years have helped re-evaluate and broadcast Rossetti's literary achievement. Anyone still in doubt about that achievement should read Helsinger's extraordinary final chapter on The House of Life (1870, 1881), a brilliant, meticulous reading that should become a compulsory critical text for those interested in Victorian poetry. With regard to poetry, Morris is hardly less well-served, as his verse, generally known only to fans or read piecemeal in anthologies, also benefits from Helsinger's imaginative and stimulating analysis, which takes in the early collection The Defence of Guenevere (1858) as well as the later Earthly Paradise (1868, 1870). As a whole, the book is full of riches and includes astute and sensitive consideration of Rossetti's translations, his sonnets for pictures, his well-known paintings of beautiful women, his book designs and illustrations, and Morris's use of colour and pattern in both his poetry and decorative art. Besides being elegantly written, this volume is handsomely produced, includes a good range of colour plates and black and white reproductions, and, helpfully, incorporates generous quotations from the poems under review.

A guiding concept in this book is translation in its different forms, but principally "what happens when the attempt to transfer form, method, or sensory substance from one medium to another produces genuine innovation" (x). The introductory chapter, which features nice readings of Morris's "Tune of Seven Towers" (1858) and Rossetti's translation of Dante's sestina "Of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni" (1861) examines, among other things, the Pre-Raphaelite understanding that "the attention cultivated by poems and works of art strives to expand receptivity in order to foster unexpected or novel connections," demanding "active imaginative participation in realizing the work's strangeness" (3). Chapter 2 continues this theme of attention concentrating on Rossetti's "sensorially rich imaginative thinking" (36), with, for example, sight taking in the suggestion of other sensory experiences such as touch and hearing. The references are to Rossetti's "Sonnets for Pictures" (1850) and "The Blessed Damozel" (1847), "his first major poem shaped by paintings" (28), and particularly notable is the treatment of "For a Marriage of St. Katharine" (1849), a sonnet whose interpolated silences or "carefully orchestrated pauses" aid its meditation on the marriage of the human to the divine (40). In chapter 3 Morris's The Defence of Guenevere is the subject for an innovative and original discussion of his use of colour, inspired by painting, as a marker of lyric intensity. The following chapter discusses how Morris evolved his use of colour in later work such as The Earthly Paradise and decorative schemes such as the Green Dining Room for the Kensington Museum. Chapter 5, "Repetition and Resemblance," examines these themes in relation to literary portraiture, and features Rossetti's unfinished supernatural tale "St. Agnes of Intercession" (1850) and the poem "The Portrait" (1870). Chapter 6 considers his portrait-like paintings of women from the 1860s and 1870s as decorative objects and "the poems that made pictures into picture-poems" (146). Chapter 7 examines Rossetti's book designs and illustrations. Helsinger's deft and detailed discussion of his illustrations for Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862) and The...