Dante Gabriel Rossetti, original name Gabriel Charles Dante

Rossetti, (born May 12, 1828, London, England—died April 9, 1882,

Birchington-on-Sea, Kent), English painter and poet who helped
found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters treating
religious, moral, and medieval subjects in a nonacademic manner.
Dante Gabriel was the most celebrated member of the Rossetti family.
Writing style
As a child Dante Gabriel Rossetti intended to be a painter and
illustrated literary subjects in his earliest drawings. He was tutored at
home in German and read the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe’s Faust,
The Arabian Nights, Dickens, and the poetry of Sir Walter
Scott and Lord Byron. After leaving school, he apprenticed himself to
the historical painter Ford Madox Brown, who later became his closest
lifelong friend. He also continued his extensive reading of poetry—
Poe, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Browning, and Tennyson—and
began in 1845 translations from Italian and German medieval poetry.
In 1847 and 1848 Rossetti began several important early poems—”My
Sister’s Sleep,” “The Blessed Damozel,” “The Bride’s Prelude,” “On
Mary’s Portrait,” “Ave,” “Jenny,” “Dante at Verona,” “A Last
Confession,” and several sonnets, a form in which he eventually
became expert.
Success as a Poet Rossetti first received recognition as a poet
in 1850, when he published “The Blessed Damozel” in the Pre-
Raphaelite journal the Germ. Written when he was only
eighteen, this poem is characteristic of much of Rossetti's later
poetry, with its sensuous detail and theme of lovers, parted by
death, who long for reunion. That same year, Rossetti met
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, who modeled for many of Rossetti's
drawings and paintings and became his wife in 1860. Works In
Literary Context

Painting to Poetry The dual nature of Rossetti's artistic

endeavors led to crossover between them. Just as his literary
background influenced his choice of mythological, allegorical,
and literary subjects for his paintings, his Pre-Raphaelite love of
detail, color, and mysticism shaped much of his poetry. The
influence of Rossetti's painting is particularly felt
throughout Poems.
Evolution of Style and Theme It is difficult to date Rossetti's
work or to divide it into periods, since he continually revised
poems begun as a young man. Nonetheless, some divisions
are possible. When Rossetti was young, his bright pictorialism,
concrete detail, archaisms, and sublimated sexuality reflected
rather conventional aspects of contemporary poetic sensibility.
By the late 1860s, his sense of failure had evolved into an
oppressive fear about identity. In Rossetti's middle and later
poetry, sexual love became a near-desperate desire to
transcend time. By comparison, the final sonnets of Rossetti's
life are tranquil, even celebratory.
Rossetti’s poetry is subordinated to intensity of emotion and is
employed to evoke a mood. It is by means of tiny and seemingly trivial
touches. Rossetti was a natural master of the sonnet, and his finest
achievement,