Sensuality, eroticism, medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, The House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti's work. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.This is the preface to The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was published in 1911 and edited by his brother William Michael Rossetti.

"The  most adequate mode of prefacing the Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as of most authors, would probably be to offer a broad general view of his writings, and to analyse with some critical precision his relation to other writers, contemporary or otherwise, and the merits and defects of his performances. In this case, as in how few others, one would also have to consider in what degree his mind worked consentaneously or diversely in two several arts—the art of poetry and the art of painting. But the hand of a brother is not the fittest to undertake any work of this scope. My preface will not therefore deal with themes such as these, but will be confined to minor matters, which may nevertheless be relevant also within their limits. And first may come a very brief outline of the few events of an outwardly uneventful life.

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, who, at an early stage of his professional career, modified his name into Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was born on 12th May 1828, at No. 38 Charlotte Street (now 110 Hallam Street), Portland Place, London.  In blood he was three-fourths Italian, and only one-fourth English; being on the father`s side wholly Italian (Abruzzese), and on the mother`s side half Italian (Tuscan) and half English. His father was Gabriele Rossetti, born in 1783 at Vasto, in the Abruzzi, Adriatic coast, in the then Kingdom of Naples. Gabriele Rossetti (died 1854) was a man of letters, a custodian of ancient bronzes in the Museo Borbonico of Naples, and a poet; he distinguished himself by patriotic lays which fostered the popular movement resulting in the grant of a constitution by Ferdinand I. of Naples in 1820.

The King, after the fashion of Bourbons and tyrants, revoked the constitution in 1821, and persecuted the abettors of it, and Rossetti had to escape for his freedom, or perhaps even for his life. He settled in London in 1824, married, and became Professor of Italian in King`s College, London, publishing also various works of bold speculation in the way of Dantesque commentary and exposition.  His wife was Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori (died 1886), daughter of Gaetano Polidori (died 1853), a teacher of Italian and literary man who had in early youth been secretary to the poet Alfieri, and who published various books, including a complete translation of Milton`s poems. Frances Polidori was English on the side of her mother, whose maiden name was Pierce. The family of Rossetti and his wife consisted of four children, born in four successive years—Maria Francesca (died 1876), Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Georgina (died 1894). Few more affectionate husbands and fathers have lived, and no better wife and mother, than Gabriele and Frances Rossetti. The means of the family were always strictly moderate, and became scanty towards 1843, when the father`s health began to fail. In 1842 (or perhaps 1841) Dante Gabriel left King`s College School, where he had learned Latin, French, and a beginning of Greek; and he entered upon the study of the art of painting, to which he had from earliest childhood exhibited a very marked bent. After a while he was admitted to the school of the Royal Academy, but never proceeded beyond its antique section. In 1848 Rossetti co-operated with two of his fellow-students in painting, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, and with the  sculptor Thomas Woolner, in forming the so-called Præraphaelite Brotherhood. There were three other members of the Brotherhood— James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and the present writer. Ford Madox Brown, the historical painter, was known to Rossetti a little before the Præraphaelite scheme was started, and bore an important part both in directing his studies and in upholding the movement, but he did not think fit to join the Brotherhood in any direct or complete sense. Through a fellow-painter, Walter Howell Deverell, Rossetti came to know Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, daughter of a Sheffield cutler, herself a milliner`s assistant, gifted with some artistic and some poetic faculty: in the Spring of 1860, after a long engagement, they married. Their wedded life was of short duration, as she died in February 1862, having meanwhile given birth to a still-born child. For several years up to this date Rossetti, designing and painting many works, in oil-colour or as yet more frequently in water-colour, had resided at No. 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge, a line of street now demolished. In the autumn of 1862 he removed to No. 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. At first certain apartments in the house were occupied by Mr. George Meredith the novelist, Mr. Swinburne the poet, and myself.  This arrangement did not last long, although I myself remained a partial inmate of the house up to 1873. My brother continued domiciled in Cheyne Walk until his death; but from 1871 he was sometimes away at Kelmscot manorhouse, in Oxfordshire, not far from Lechlade, occupied jointly by himself, and by the poet Mr. William Morris with his family. From the autumn of 1872 till the summer of 1874 he was wholly settled at Kelmscot, scarcely visiting London at all. He then returned to London, and Kelmscot passed out of his ken. 

In the early months of 1850 the members of the Præraphaelite Brotherhood, with the co-operation of some friends, brought out a short-lived magazine named The Germ (afterwards Art and Poetry); here appeared the first verses and the first prose published by Rossetti, including The Blessed  Damozel and Hand and Soul. In 1856 he contributed a little to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, printing there The Burden of Nineveh and Staff and Scrip. In 1861, during his married life, he published his volume of translations The Early Italian Poets, now entitled Dante and his Circle. By the time therefore of the death of his wife he had a certain restricted yet far from inconsiderable reputation as a poet, along with his recognized position as a painter—a non-exhibiting painter, for, after the first two or three years of his professional course, he adhered with practical uniformity to the plan of abstaining from exhibition altogether. He had contemplated bringing out in or about 1862 a volume of original poems; but, in the grief and dismay which over-whelmed him in losing his wife, he determined to sacrifice to her memory this long-cherished project, and he buried in her coffin the manuscripts which would have furnished forth the volume. With the lapse of years he came to see that, as a final settlement of the matter, this was neither obligatory nor desirable; so in 1869 the manuscripts were disinterred, and in 1870 his volume named Poems was issued. For some considerable while it was hailed with general and lofty praise, chequered by only moderate stricture or demur; but late in 1871 Mr. Robert Buchanan published under a pseudonym, in the Contemporary Review, a very hostile article named The Fleshly School of Poetry, attacking the poems on literary and more especially on moral grounds. The article, in an enlarged form, was afterwards reissued as a pamphlet. The assault produced on Rossetti an effect altogether disproportionate to its intrinsic importance; indeed, it developed in his character an excess of sensitiveness and of distempered brooding which his nearest relatives and friends had never before surmised, —for hitherto he had on the whole had an ample sufficiency of high spirits, combined with a certain underlying gloominess or abrupt moodiness of nature and outlook. Unfortunately there was in him already only too much of morbid material on which this venom of detraction was to work. For some years the state of his eyesight had given very grave cause for apprehension, he himself fancying from time to time that the evil might end in absolute blindness, a fate with which our father had been formidably threatened in his closing years. From this or other causes insomnia had ensued, coped with by far too free a use of chloral, which may have begun towards the spring of 1870. In the summer of 1872 he had a dangerous crisis of illness; and from that time forward, but more especially from the middle of 1874, he became secluded in his habits of life, and often depressed, fanciful, and gloomy. Not indeed that there were no intervals of serenity, even of brightness; for in fact he was often genial and pleasant, and a most agreeable companion with as much bonhomie as acuteness for wiling an evening away. He continued also to prosecute his pictorial work with ardour and diligence, and at times he added to his product as a poet. The second of his original volumes, Ballads and Sonnets, was published in the autumn of 1881.  About the same time he sought change of air and scene in the Vale of St. John, near Keswick, Cumberland; but he returned to town more shattered in health and in mental tone than he had ever been before. In December a shock of a quasi-paralytic character struck him down. He rallied sufficiently to remove to Birchington-on-Sea, near Margate. 

The hand of death was then upon him, and was to be relaxed no more. The last stage of his maladies was uræmia. Tended by his mother and his sister Christina, with the constant companionship at Birchington of Mr. Hall Caine, and in the presence likewise of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, Mr. Frederic Shields, and myself, he died on Easter Sunday, April 9th 1882. His sister-in-law, the daughter of Madox Brown, arrived immediately after his latest breath had been drawn. He lies buried in the churchyard of Birchington.

Few brothers were more constantly together, or shared one another`s feelings and thoughts more intimately, in childhood, boyhood, and well on into mature manhood, than Dante Gabriel and myself. I have no idea of limning his character here at any length, but will define a few of its leading traits. He was always and essentially of a dominant turn, in intellect and in temperament a leader. He was impetuous and vehement, and necessarily therefore impatient; easily angered, easily appeased, although the embittered feelings of his later years obscured this amiable quality to some extent; constant and helpful as a friend where he perceived constancy to be reciprocated; free-handed and heedless of expenditure, whether for himself or for others; in family affection warm and equable, and (except in relation to our mother, for whom he had a fondling love) not demonstrative. Never on stilts in matters of the intellect or of aspiration, but steeped in the sense of beauty, and loving, if not always practising, the good; keenly alive also to the laughable as well as the grave or solemn side of things; superstitious in grain, and anti-scientific to the marrow.

Throughout his youth and early manhood I considered him to be markedly free from vanity, though certainly well equipped in pride; the distinction between these two tendencies was less definite in his closing years. Extremely natural and therefore totally unaffected in tone and manner, with the naturalism characteristic of Italian blood; good-natured and hearty, without being complaisant or accommodating; reserved at times, yet not haughty; desultory enough in youth, diligent and persistent in maturity; self-centred always, and brushing aside whatever traversed his purpose or his bent. He was very generally and very greatly liked by persons of extremely diverse character; indeed, I think it can be no exaggeration to say that no one ever disliked him. Of course I do not here confound the question of liking a man`s personality with that of approving his conduct out-and-out.

Of his manner I can perhaps convey but a vague impression. I have said that it was natural; it was likewise eminently easy, and even of the free-and-easy kind. There was a certain British bluffness, streaking the finely poised Italian suppleness and facility. As he was thoroughly unconventional, caring not at all to fall in with the humours or pre-possessions of any particular class of society, or to conciliate or approximate the socially distinguished, there was little in him of any veneer or varnish of elegance; none the less he was courteous and well-bred, meeting all sorts of persons upon equal terms—i.e., upon his own terms; and I am satisfied that those who are most exacting in such matters  found in Rossetti nothing to derogate from the standard of their requirements. In habit of body he was indolent and lounging, disinclined to any prescribed or trying exertion of any sort, and very difficult to stir out of his ordinary groove, yet not wanting in active promptitude whenever it suited his liking. He often seemed totally unoccupied, especially  of an evening; no doubt the brain was busy enough.

The appearance of my brother was to my eye rather Italian than English, though I have more than once heard it said that there was nothing observable to bespeak foreign blood.  He was of rather low middle stature, say five feet seven and a half, like our father; and, as the years advanced, he resembled our father not a little in a characteristic way, yet with highly obvious divergences. Meagre in youth, he was at times decidedly fat in mature age. The complexion, clear and warm, was also dark, but not dusky or sombre. The hair was dark and somewhat silky; the brow grandly spacious and solid; the full-sized eyes blueish-grey; the nose shapely, decided, and rather projecting, with an aquiline tendency and large nostrils, and perhaps no detail in the face was more noticeable at a first glance than the very strong indentation at the spring of the nose below the forehead; the mouth moderately well-shaped, but with a rather thick and un-moulded under-lip; the chin unremarkable; the line of the jaw, after youth was passed, full, rounded, and sweeping; the ears well-formed and rather small than large. His lips were wide, his hands and feet small; the hands very much those of the artist or author type, white, delicate, plump, and soft as a woman`s. His gait was resolute and rapid, his general aspect compact and determined, the prevailing expression of  the face that of a fiery and dictatorial mind concentrated into repose. Some people regarded Rossetti as eminently handsome; few, I think, would have refused him the epithet of well-looking. It rather surprises me to find from Mr. Caine`s book of Recollections that that gentleman, when he first saw Rossetti in 1880, considered him to look full ten years older than he really was,—namely, to look as if sixty-two years old. To my own eye nothing of the sort was apparent. He wore moustaches from early youth, shaving his cheeks; from 1873 or thereabouts he grew whiskers and beard, moderately full and auburn-tinted, as well as moustaches. His voice was deep and harmonious; in the reading of poetry, remarkably rich, with rolling swell and musical cadence.

My brother was very little of a traveller; he disliked the interruption of his ordinary habits of life, and the flurry or discomfort, involved in locomotion; moreover, he was a bad sailor. In boyhood he knew Boulogne: he was in Paris three or four times, and twice visited some principal cities of Belgium. This was the whole extent of his foreign travelling. He crossed the Scottish border more than once and knew various parts of England pretty well—Hastings, Bath, Oxford, Matlock, Stratford-on-Avon, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Bognor, Herne Bay; Kelmscot, Keswick, and Birchington-on-Sea have been already mentioned. From 1878 or there-abouts he became, until he went to the neighbourhood of Keswick, an absolute home-keeping recluse, never even straying outside the large garden of his own house, except to visit from time to time our mother in the central part of London.

From an early period of life he had a large circle of friends, and could always have commanded any amount of intercourse with any number of ardent or kindly well-wishers, had he but felt elasticity or cheerfulness of mind enough for the purpose. I should do injustice to my own feelings if I were not to mention here some of his leading friends. First and foremost I name Mr. Madox Brown, his chief intimate throughout life, on the unexhausted resources of whose affection and converse he drew incessantly for long years; they were at last separated by the removal of Mr. Brown to Manchester, for the purpose of painting the Town Hall frescoes. The Præraphaelites—Millais, Hunt, Woolner, Stephens, Collinson —were on terms of unbounded familiarity with him in youth; owing to death or other causes, he lost sight eventually of all of them except Mr. Stephens. Mr. William Bell Scott was, like Mr. Brown, a close friend from a very early period until the last; Scott being both poet and painter, there was a strict bond of affinity between him and Rossetti. Mr. Ruskin was extremely intimate with my brother from 1854 till about 1865, and was of material help to his professional career.

As he rose towards celebrity, Rossetti knew Burne Jones, and through him Morris and Swinburne, all staunch and fervently sympathetic friends. Mr. Shields was a rather later acquaintance, who soon became an intimate, equally respected and cherished. Then Mr. Hueffer the musical critic (afterwards a close family connection, editor of the Tauchnitz edition of Rossetti`s works), and Dr. Hake the poet. Through the latter my brother came to know Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose intellectual companionship and incessant assiduity of friendship did more than anything else towards assuaging the discomforts and depression of his losing years.  In the latest period the most intimate among new acquaintances were Mr. William Sharp and Mr. Hall Caine, both of them known to Rossettian readers as his biographers. Nor should I omit to speak of the extremely friendly relation in which my brother stood to some of the principal purchasers of his pictures—Mr. Leathart, Mr. Rae, Mr. Leyland, Mr. Graham, Mr. Valpy, Mr. Turner, and his early associate Mr. Boyce. Other names crowd upon me—James Hannay, John Tupper, Patmore, Thomas and John Seddon, Mrs. Bodichon, Browning, John Marshall, Tebbs, Mrs. Gilchrist, Miss Boyd, Sandys, Whistler, Joseph Knight, Fairfax Murray, Mr. and Mrs. Stillman, Treffry Dunn, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple,Oliver Madox Brown, the Marstons, father and son—but I forbear.

Before proceeding to some brief account of the sequence etc. of my brother`s writings, it may be worth while to speak of the poets who were particularly influential in nurturing his mind and educing its own poetic endowment. The first poet with whom he became partially familiar was Shakespeare. Then  flowed the usual boyish fancies for Walter Scott and Byron. The Bible was deeply impressive to him, perhaps above all Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Apocalypse. Byron gave place to Shelley when my brother was about sixteen years of age; and Mrs. Browning and the old English or Scottish ballads rapidly ensued. It may have been towards this date, say 1845, that he first seriously applied himself to Dante, and drank deep of that inexhaustible well-head of poesy and thought; for the Florentine, though familiar to him as a name, and in some sense as a pervading penetrative influence, from earliest childhood, was not really  aimilated until boyhood was practically past. Bailey`s Festus was enormously relished about the same time—read again and yet again; also Faust, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset (and along with them a swarm of French novelists), and Keats, whom my brother for the most part, though not without some compunctious  sitings now and then, truly preferred to Shelley. The only classical poet whom he took to in any degree worth speaking of was Homer, the Odyssey considerably more than the Iliad. Tennyson reigned along with Keats, and Edgar Poe and Coleridge along with Tennyson.  In the long run he perhaps enjoyed and revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet whatsoever; but Coleridge was not so distinctly or separately in the ascendant, at any particular period of youth, as several of the others. Blake likewise had his peculiar meed of homage, and Charles Wells, the influence of whose prose style, in the Stories after Nature, I trace to some extent in Rossetti`s Hand and Soul. Lastly came Browning, and for a time, like the serpent-rod of Moses, swallowed up all the rest. This was still at an early stage of life; for I think the year 1847 cannot certainly have been passed before my brother was deep in Browning. The readings or fragmentary recitations of Bells and Pomegranates, Paracelsus, and above all Sordello, are something to remember from a now distant past. My brother lighted upon Pauline (published anonymously) in the British Museum, copied it out, recognized that it must be Browning`s, and wrote to the great poet at a venture to say so, receiving a cordial response, followed by a genial and friendly intercourse for several years. One prose-work of great influence upon my brother`s mind, and upon his product as a painter, must not be left unspecified—Malory`s Mort d`Arthur, which he knew to some extent in boyhood, and which engrossed him towards 1856.  The only poet whom I feel it needful to add to the above is Chatterton. In the last two or three years of his life my brother entertained an abnormal—I think an exaggerated—admiration of Chatterton. It appears to me that (to use a very hackneyed phrase) he “evolved this from his inner consciousness” at that late period; certainly in youth and early manhood he had no such feeling. He then read the poems of Chatterton with cursory glance and unexcited spirit, recognizing them as very singular performances for  their date in English literature, and for the author`s boyish years, but beyond that laying no marked stress upon them.

The reader may perhaps be surprised to find some names unmentioned in this list: I have stated the facts as I remember and know them. Chaucer, Spenser, the Elizabethan dramatists (other than Shakespear), Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, are unnamed. It should not be supposed that he read them not at all, or cared not for any of them; but, if we except Chaucer in a rather loose way and (at a late period of life) Marlowe in some of his non-dramatic poems, they were comparatively neglected. Thomas Hood he valued highly; also very highly Burns in mature years, but he was not a constant reader of the Scottish lyrist. Of Italian poets he earnestly loved none save Dante: Cavalcanti in his degree, and also Poliziano and Michelangelo—not Petrarca, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, or Leopardi, though in boyhood he delighted well enough in Ariosto. Of French poets, none beyond Hugo and Alfred de Musset; except Villon, and partially Dumas, whose novels ranked among his favourite reading.  In German poetry he read nothing currently in the original, although (as our pages bear witness) he had in earliest youth so far mastered the language as to make some translations.  Calderon, in Fitzgerald`s version, he admired deeply; but this was only at a late date. He had no liking for the specialities of Scandinavian, nor indeed of Teutonic, thought and work, and little or no curiosity about Oriental—such as Indian, Persian, or Arabic—poetry. Any writing about devils, spectres, or the supernatural generally, whether in poetry or in prose, had always a fascination for him; at one time, say 1844, his supreme delight was the blood-curdling romance of Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer.

I now pass to a specification of my brother`s own writings.  Of his merely childish or boyish performances I need have said nothing, were it not that they have been mentioned in other books regarding Rossetti. First then there was The Slave, a “drama” which he composed and wrote out in or about the seventh year of his age. It is of course simple nonsense. “Slave” and “traitor” were two words which he found passim in Shakespear; so he gave to his principal characters the names of Slave and Traitor. If what they do is meaningless, what they say (when they deviate from prose) is not exactly unmetrical. Towards his thirteenth year he began a romantic prose-tale named Roderick and Rosalba. I hardly think that he composed anything else prior to the ballad narrative Sir Hugh the Heron, founded on a tale by Allan Cunningham. Our grandfather printed it in 1843, which is some couple of years after the date of its composition. It is correctly enough versified, but has no merit, and little that could even be called promise. Soon afterwards a prose-tale named Sorrentino, in which the devil played a conspicuous part, was begun, and carried to some length; it was of course boyish, but it must, I think, have shown some considerable degree of cleverness. In 1844 there was the translation of Bürger`s Lenore, spirited and fairly efficient; and in November 1845 was begun a translation of the Nibelungenlied, almost deserving (if my memory serves me) to be considered good. Several hundred lines of it must certainly have been written. My brother was by this time a practised and competent versifier, at any rate, and his mere prentice-work may count as finished.

Other original verse, not in any large quantity, succeeded along with the version of Der Arme Heinrich, and the beginning of his translations from the early Italians. These must I think, have been in full career in the first half of 1847, and may even have begun in 1845. They show a keen sensitiveness to whatsoever is poetic in the originals, and a sinuous strength and ease in providing English equivalents, with the command of a rich and romantic vocabulary. In his nineteenth year, or before 12th May 1847, he wrote The Blessed Damozel. As that is universally recognized as one of his typical or consummate productions, marking the high level of his faculty whether inventive or executive, I may here close this record of preliminaries; the poems, with such slight elucidations as my notes supply, being left to speak for themselves. I will only add that for some while, more especially in the latter part of 1848 and in 1849, my brother practised his pen to no small extent in writing sonnets to bouts-rimés. He and I would sit together in our bare little room at the top of No. 50 Charlotte Street, I giving him the rhymes for a sonnet, and he me the rhymes for another; and we would write off our emulous exercises with considerable speed, he constantly the more rapid of the two. From five to eight minutes may have been the average time for one of his sonnets; not unfrequently more, and sometimes hardly so much. In fact, the pen scribbled away at its fastest. Several of his bouts-rimés sonnets still exist in my possession, a little touched up after the first draft: I still present most of them in this re-edition. Some have a faux air of intensity of meaning, as well as of expression; but their real core of significance is necessarily small, the only wonder being how he could spin so deftly with so weak a thread. I may be allowed to mention that most of my own sonnets (and not sonnets alone) published in The Germ were bouts-rimés experiments such as above described. In poetic tone they are of course inferior to my brother`s work of like fashioning; in point of sequence or self-congruity of meaning, the comparison might be less to my disadvantage.

Dante Rossetti was a very fastidious writer, and, I might add, a very fastidious painter. He did not indeed “cudgel his brains” for the idea of a poem or the structure or diction of a stanza. He wrote out of a large fund or reserve of thought and consideration, which would culminate in a clear impulse or (as we say) an inspiration. In the execution he was always heedful and reflective from the first, and he spared no after-pains in clarifying and perfecting. He abhorred anything straggling, slipshod, profuse, or uncondensed.  He often recurred to his old poems, and was reluctant to leave them merely as they were. A natural concomitant of this state of mind was a great repugnance to the notion of publishing, or of having published after his death, whatever he regarded as juvenile, petty, or inadequate. As editor of his Collected Works, I have had to regulate myself to a large extent by these feelings of his, whether my own entirely correspond with them or not. The amount of unpublished work which he left behind him was by no means large; out of the moderate bulk I have been careful to select only such examples as I suppose that he would himself have approved for the purpose, or would, at any rate, not gravely have objected to. A few, which he might have objected to, figure as Juvenilia. Some details regarding the new items will be found among my notes. Some projects or arguments of poems which he never executed are also printed among his prose-writings. These particular projects had, I think, been practically abandoned by him in all the later years of his life; but there was one subject which he had seriously at heart, and for which he had collected some materials, and he would perhaps have put it into shape had he lived a year or two longer—a ballad on the subject of Joan of Arc to match The White Ship and The King`s Tragedy.

I have not unfrequently heard my brother say that he considered himself more essentially a poet than a painter.  To vary the form of expression, he thought that he had mastered the means of embodying poetical conceptions in the verbal and rhythmical vehicle more thoroughly than in form and design, perhaps more thoroughly than in colour".

WILLIAM M. ROSSETTI.

LONDON, April 1911.

Thanks to William Michael Rossetti for biography info.