Rossetti, Dante Gabriel

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828–82), the son of Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854), an Italian patriot who came to England in 1824. He studied painting with Millais and H. Hunt, and in 1848, with them and four others, founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Several of his poems, including ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and ‘My Sister's Sleep’, and a prose piece, ‘Hand and Soul’, were published in the Germ (1850). In 1854 he met Ruskin and in 1856 W. Morris, whom he greatly influenced; he was to paint Morris's wife Jane many times. In 1860 Rossetti and Elizabeth ( Lizzie) Siddal (or Siddall) married; she was by this time an invalid, and after a brief recovery of health and spirits she gave birth to a still-born child. She died in 1862, from an overdose of laudanum. Later that year he moved to 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. In 1868 he showed a renewed interest in poetry, possibly inspired by renewed contact with Jane Morris; sixteen sonnets, including the ‘Willowwood’ sequence, were published in March 1869 in the Fortnightly Review. That summer he arranged the exhumation of poems buried with his wife. Poems (1870) contained ‘Sister Helen’, ‘Troy Town’, ‘Eden Bower’, ‘Jenny’, and the first part of his sonnet sequence ‘The House of Life’. In 1871 Morris and Rossetti took a joint lease of Kelmscott Manor, where Rossetti continued his intimacy with Jane, with Morris's apparent consent. In Oct. 1871 appeared R. Buchanan's notorious attack ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ (under the pseudonym Thomas Maitland) in the Contemporary Review. Rossetti's reply, ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism’, appeared in the Athenaeum, Dec. 1872. Rossetti's later years were overshadowed by ill-health and chloral, though he was recognized by a new generation of aesthetes, including Pater and Wilde, as a source of inspiration. Poems and Ballads and Sonnets both appeared in 1881; the first was largely rearrangements of earlier works, and the second completed ‘The House of Life’ with 47 new sonnets, and also contained other new work, including ‘Rose Mary’, ‘The King's Tragedy’ and ‘The White Ship’.

Rossetti's poetry is marred for many readers by its vast and cloudy generalities about Life, Love, and Death, though much of it has an undeniable emotional and erotic power. His letters (ed. O. Doughty and J. R. Wahl, 4 vols, 1965–7) reveal another side of his colourful and extravagant personality; they are witty, irreverent, at times coarse. Mention should also be made of his translations from the Italian (The Early Italian Poets Together with Dante's Vita Nuova, 1861, known later as Dante and his Circle, 1874), and of Villon.

The standard edition of his collected works, edited by W. M. Rossetti, appeared in 1911.