United States or United States Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Naturally such an announcement as the above has excited great curiosity among admirers of Rossetti, and I am frequently receiving letters—some of them cordial enough, but others far from cordial—asking, or rather demanding, to know the reason why important poems of Rossetti’s have for so long a period been withheld from the public.
W. M. Rossetti’s, and is one of the best features of this volume. In these days of empty pretence it is always refreshing to come upon a page written in the spirit of scholarly self-suppression which informs every line this patient and admirable critic writes.
Were I even competent to enter upon the discussion of Rossetti’s gifts as a poet and as a painter, it would not be possible to do so here and at this moment. And the same, I think, may be said of his painting. Those who had the privilege of a personal acquaintance with him knew how “of imagination all compact” he was. Imagination, indeed, was at once his blessing and his bane.
These readings were as fine as Rossetti’s recitations of ‘Jim Bludso’ and other specimens of Yankee humour. And yet it is a common remark, and one that cannot be gainsaid, that there is no spark of humour in the published poems of either of these two friends. Did it never occur to any critic to ask whether the anomaly was not explicable by some theory of poetic art that they held in common?
The artist who had perhaps the strongest influence upon Rossetti’s early tastes was Ford Madox Brown, who, however, refused from the first to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on the ground that coteries had in modern art no proper function. Rossetti was deeply impressed with the power and designing faculty displayed by Madox Brown’s cartoons exhibited in Westminster Hall.
Time, however, is the suzerain before whom every king, even Sorrow himself, bows at last. The rights of Rossetti’s admirers can no longer be set at nought, and I am making arrangements to publish within the present year ‘Jan Van Hunks’ and the ‘Sphinx Sonnets,’ the former of which will show a new and, I think, unexpected side of Rossetti’s genius.
Rossetti’s first valentine was received when she was nearly seventy-six years of age, and she continued every year to receive a valentine until 1886, when she died. Surely there is not in the history of English poetry anything more fascinating than these valentines. It is pleasing to see the book open with the following dedication by Mr. W. M. Rossetti:—
Again, certain passages in these letters will surprise the reader by throwing light upon a side of Rossetti’s life and character which was only known to his intimate friends. Recluse as Rossetti came to be, he knew more of “London life” in the true sense of the word than did many of those who were supposed to know it well—diners-out like Browning, for instance, and Richard Doyle.
One buyer—a most worthy man, to be sure, and a true friend of Rossetti’s, but full of that British superstition about the saving grace of clothes which is so wonderful a revelation to the pensive foreigner—had to be humoured in his craze against the nude. W. M. Rossetti supposes, to the Marguerite alluded to in a letter to Mr.
W. M. Rossetti’s paraphrase of ‘The House of Life’—done with so much admiration of his brother’s genius and affection for his memory—touches upon a question relating to poetic art which has been raised before—raised in connexion with prose renderings of Homer, Sophocles, and Dante: Are poetry and prose so closely related in method that one can ever be adequately turned into the other?
Word Of The Day