William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne

As Pre-Raphaelite Poets: The Quest for Spiritual Experience

In Pre-Raphaelite Poetry

By

Payel Roy

College Roll Number : 19ENGA004

Registration Number : 411-1212-0126-19

CU Roll Number : 192411-11-0183

Bijoy Krishna Girls’ College, Howrah

English Honours , Semester- 4

Paper- CC10
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William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne as Pre-Raphaelite Poets:

The Quest for Spiritual Experience in Pre-Raphaelite Poetry

History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has

remembered the people, because they created. – William Morris.

In 1848, the year more famous as the year of publication of Communist Manifesto by

Marx and Angels, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt

founded a brotherhood – called the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”. The term generally refers

to a company of seven young men- D.G Rossetti, his brother William Michael Rossetti,

William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, James Collinson, Frederick George Stevens and

Thomas Woolner – who formed the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in England. Their official

literary organ was The Germ, in which much of the early works of Morris and Rossetti

appeared. They took for their models early Italian painters who, they declared, were ‘simple,

sincere and religious’. Their purpose of the movement was to encourage simplicity and

naturalness in art and literature.

The eldest of the Pre-Raphaelite school of artists and poets, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was

both a painter and a poet. In poetry, as in art, he broke away from the tradition. His poetical

works are small in bulk, consisting of two slight volumes, Poems (1870) and Ballads and

Sonnets (1881). The poems are of high quality, and can be securely placed among the highest.

Rossetti was truly a poet of genius.

William Morris imbibed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite school under the influence

of Rossetti. He had strong interest in medieval literature. His affinity with medievalism was

vividly traced in The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems (1858) which was published in
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1858, when he was only 24 years old. The Life and Death was published in 1867, is a

romantic narrative which helped him to attain fame. His another important work was The

Earthly Paradise (1868-70), a series of narrative poems, which is based on classical and

medieval events. Reflection of Chaucer’s language is evident in his work. His remarkable

narrative poem is The Story of the Sigurd and Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs which is

based on the Norse sagas. Morris had a socialist idealism. While he looked back to the middle

ages for the satisfaction of his poetic mind, he also prepared a socialist blueprint for the

future of his country.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), another member of the movement, was not like

the members of Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood as a painter, but a musician. “Just as Rossetti

made thought pictorially sensuous. Shelley’s music is the music of the lute; Swinburne’s the

music of a full orchestra.”

Swinburne’s Atlanta in Calydon (1865) is an attempt at English version of a Greek

tragedy and was his first attempt at poetic practice. The work at once earned him reputation.

Poems and Ballads (1866) his second extraordinary book. His other poetical works include

Songs Before Sunrise (1871), a collection of poems chiefly in praise of Italian liberty contains

some beautiful pieces. His Erectheus (1876) modelled on a Greek tragedy achieved little

success; but his Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882) is a narrative, surcharged with

much passion and force, was composed in the heroic couplet. Although Swinburne wrote

plays, and serious critical literature like William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868), A Study of

Shakespeare (1880) and A Study of Ben Jonson (1889), his gifts were chiefly lyrical. A

beautiful specimen of Swinburne’s lyrics is in the following lines:

I am tired of tears and laughter,

And men that laugh and weep;

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Of what may come hereafter

For men that sow to reap:

I am weary of days and hours,

Blown buds of barren flowers

Desires and dreams and powers

And everything but sleep. - The Garden of Proserpine

The Pre-Raphaelite poetry’s characteristics are very rich and very vast. It focuses on

the glorification of art, and gives a strong conception of senses and situations, precise

delineation, lavish imagery and metaphor. By these characteristics, the Pre-Raphaelite Poetry

leaves a lasting impression in the English literature.

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