ABSTRACT
In the decades after the publication of Modern Love, male and female poets continued to appropriate the sonnet for their own aims and purposes, widening its thematic scope far beyond its traditional Petrarchan/Elizabethan and Miltonic/ Wordsworthian concerns. While The House of Life embraces the extraordinary capacity of metaphor to transfer and elaborate meaning, exploiting it and carrying it to unprecedented extremes, Webster's Mother and Daughter sonnets function as poignant reminders of the vestiges of experience upon which Rossetti's tropes are built. Besides precluding appreciation of Mother and Daughter as a poetic achievement in its own right, the propensity of present-day critics to present the poets within Rossetti's direct sphere of influence as his literary sons and daughters also impedes a more comprehensive understanding of the fundamentally different material and artistic contexts where The House of Life and Mother and Daughter were written and passed down to posterity.
