Question

Christina Rossetti

Accepted Answer

Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is famous for "Goblin Market" and "Remember". She wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in the British Isles: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set to music by Gustav Holst and by Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set by Harold Darke and by other composers

Rossetti began writing down and dating her poems from 1842, most of which imitated her favoured poets. In 1847 she began experimenting with verse forms such as sonnets, hymns and ballads, while drawing narratives from the Bible, folk tales and the lives of saints. Her early pieces often feature meditations on death and loss, in the Romantic tradition. She published her first two poems ("Death's Chill Between", "Heart's Chill Between") in the Athenaeum in 1848, when she was 18. Under the pseudonym "Ellen Alleyne" she contributed to the literary magazine, The Germ, published by the Pre-Raphaelites from January to April 1850 and edited by her brother William. This marked the beginning of her public career.

Rossetti's more critical reflections on the artistic movement begun by her brother find expression in her 1856 poem "In the Artist's Studio". Here she reflects on seeing multiple paintings of the same model. For Rossetti, the artist's idealised vision of the model's character begins to overwhelm his work, until "every canvas means/the one same meaning." Dinah Roe, in her Introduction to the Penguin Classics collection of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, argues that this critique of her brother and similar male artists is not so much about "the objectification of women" as about "the male artist's self-worship".

Rossetti's most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, appeared in 1862, when she was 31. It received widespread critical praise, establishing her as the foremost female poet of the time. Hopkins, Swinburne and Tennyson lauded her, and with the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861 she was hailed as her natural successor. The title poem is one of Rossetti's best known. Although it is ostensibly about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, critics have interpreted the piece in a variety of ways, seeing it as an allegory about temptation and salvation, a commentary on Victorian gender roles and female agency, and a work about erotic desire and social redemption. Rossetti was a volunteer worker from 1859 to 1870 at the St Mary Magdalene house of charity in Highgate, a refuge for former prostitutes, and it is suggested that Goblin Market may have been inspired by the "fallen women" she came to know. There are parallels with Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in both poems' religious themes of temptation, sin and redemption by vicarious suffering. Swinburne in 1883 dedicated A Century of Roundels to Rossetti, as she adopted his roundel form in a number of poems, for instance in Wife to Husband. She was ambivalent about women's suffrage, but many scholars have found feminist themes in her poetry. She opposed slavery (in the American South), cruelty to animals (in the prevalent practice of animal experimentation), and the exploitation of girls in under-age prostitution.

Rossetti maintained a large circle of friends and correspondents, and continued to write and publish for the rest of her life, focusing mainly on devotional writing and children's poetry. In 1892, she wrote The Face of the Deep, a book of devotional prose, and oversaw production of a new and enlarged edition of Sing-Song in 1893.

Rossetti Wrote Brother Rossetti's Artist's Christina December Poet