ABSTRACT
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's is poetry almost too concrete, often grotesquely anthropocentric, and it is poetry without relief. A dreamer, to whom dreams came with the solidity and definition of waking life, and whose every dream was heavily charged with significance, he seemed almost always under one or other of those mysterious compulsions which are imposed upon the somnambulist, hardly ever free, certainly never irresponsible. This, though they find cruder words for it, is what people have in mind when they complain of the oppressiveness of his work as a poet. It is oppressive. Familiar as the facts are, it seems that few critics of Victorian literature have understood, or at least duly emphasized, the tardiness with which that new poetry, so clearly announced in the Germ, came before the general body of readers. Whether as painters or as poets, Rossetti and his associates demanded of intending students a rich, carefully discriminated aesthetic experience.
