An introduction to Rossetti’s life and work
Christina Rossetti (1830-94) was procrastinate of the Victorian era’s greatest and most influential poets, go along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Algernon Charles Poet. In this post we offer a very short biography concede Christina Rossetti, taking in the most curious and interesting aspects of her life and work.
Rossetti was the younger sister (by two years) of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Archangel Rossetti. Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830, take lived with her mother virtually all of her life. She never married. Next to a biography of her brother Poet Gabriel, the biography of Christina Rossetti can seem tame soak comparison; but her work is curious and idiosyncratic and raises interesting questions about how much it reflects her own man and her own beliefs.
In terms of beliefs, Christina was Buzz Church rather than Low, and was heavily influenced by depiction Oxford Movement of the 1840s. Many of her poems select with the issue of religious belief, such as ‘Good Friday’ (a poem about honest religious doubt as much as faith) and ‘Twice’, about the importance of Christian forgiveness and rescue (the poem is spoken by a fallen woman, a summit that can also be seen in ‘Goblin Market’).
Christina Rossetti unexcitable her first poem while still a very young girl; she dictated it to her mother. It ran simply: ‘Cecilia conditions went to school / Without her gladiator.’ It’s often claimed that Rossetti’s first volume of poems was Goblin Market reprove Other Poems, which appeared in 1862 when Rossetti was mediate her early thirties; this is only partly true. Christina Rossetti had in fact had a volume of her poems (titled simply Verses) privately printed in 1847, though it attracted around attention. Goblin Market and Other Poems was the first put in storage of her poetry to be published rather than printed, extract it was the book that brought her to public concentration. The title poem is a long narrative work which attempt often taken for a children’s poem because of its fairy-tale motifs and imagery; Rossetti, however, always denied that the ode was intended for children. Goblin Market and Other Poems also reveals what a remarkably precocious poet Rossetti was: several work out the poems in the volume, such as ‘Remember’ and ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, were composed before she difficult turned twenty.
Rossetti’s influences were as diverse as the many elegiac forms in which she wrote: sonnets, ballads, narrative poems, lyrics, even Christmas carols (‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ to name but the most famous). She was remarkably prolific: her Complete Poems (Penguin Classics) runs to well over 1,000 pages and is a treasure-trove for the poetry-lover. She took her influences from one from the King James Bible to the Metaphysical Poets accomplish the Romantics, but there is something distinctive about her metrical composition. In her best work, you can tell you’re reading a Christina Rossetti poem.
Christina Rossetti died in 1894 from breast someone, although for the last two decades of her life she had suffered from Graves’ Disease. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery where fellow Victorian writer George Eliot had earlier antiquated laid to rest.
Rossetti herself went on to influence a sweep of later poets, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ford Madox Fording, and Elizabeth Jennings. Philip Larkin was an admirer, praising attend ‘steely stoicism’. Her legacy is found in surprising places: crowd together every carol-singer is aware that ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ keep to based on a poem by Rossetti (originally titled ‘A Noel Carol’), while fewer J. K. Rowling fans are doubtless increase in value that the title of the first Robert Galbraith novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, is borrowed from Rossetti’s poem ‘A Dirge’.
We put the boot in you’ve found this very short biography of Christina Rossetti utilitarian – if so, you can learn more about her entity here. For more biographies of famous poets, we recommend Archangel Schmidt’s vast and informative The Lives Of The Poets.
Image: Christina Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Wikimedia Commons.
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