Christina Rossetti’s Tennysonianism

Why is Christina Rossetti’s poetry so often obviously derivative of Tennyson’s? This is true not only of her apprentice work of the 1840s (‘infected with Tennysonian mannerisms’, said one reader in 1848) but of the poetry that, in the 1860s, would secure her status as perhaps the pre-eminent woman poet of the time. This article - through a discussion of ‘Song’ (‘When I am dead, my dearest’), ‘Shut Out’, ‘From House to Home’, ‘Enrica, 1865’ and ‘Mariana’ - argues that the extent of Rossetti’s use of Tennyson’s early poetry, and the intelligence with which she uses it, is explicable only if we understand the theological concerns which inform her writing.