Rossetti and His Circle

Dante Gabriel Rossetti ¹ (1828–1882) was the son of Gabrielle Rossetti, a political exile from Italy, poet, opera librettist, and student of Dante. ² The future poet-painter passed his youth in the Italian colony in London, but his father was a constitutional royalist and saw little of Mazzini and the other exiled republicans. ³ A characteristic indifference to politics dates probably from Rossetti's boyhood. His education was irregular and mostly at home. He and his brother and two sisters ⁴ were brought up under “the shadow of Dante,” who remained one of the great influences upon his imagination. ⁵ To the later poets of Italy he was never much attracted, nor did he ever visit the land of his ancestors. He was a child of precocious promise, writing a drama at the age of four, imitating in early drawings the style of contemporary German illustrators, and, when he was twelve, composing a ballad, Sir Hugh the Heron, in the manner of Scott. A few years later he made versions of Burger's Lenore and of portions of the Nibelungenlied. His interests were always divided evenly between poetry and painting, ⁶ and while he studied at the Royal Academy and afterwards as a pupil of Ford Madox Brown, ⁷ he began a translation of the Vita Nuova. The poetry of Keats ⁸ and Browning, the tales and poems of Edgar A. Poe, and the Gothic romances were among the formative influences; and after he made the lucky purchase of a manuscript volume of unpublished poems by Blake, that poet, then practically unknown, also influenced him. ⁹ During 1847–1848 he composed the first versions of The Blessed Damozel, The Portrait, and other poems which, circulating in manuscript, established his reputation in a privileged circle as a new force in poetry long before he became known to the public. In 1848 he and six friends ¹⁰ formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.