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Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was born in London, the Son of an Italian refugee who was professor of Italian at Kings College, where Rossetti received his early education. He began to Compose poetry by the time he was six, and later studied drawing at the Royal Academy School (1846). Shortly after this (1848) he met Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, and the painter Millais, with whom he formed the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Ruskin, Swinburne, and William Morris were among his later friends, and Ruskin was of considerable financial assistance to him. Toward the close of his life he became a chloral addict, and, though he eventually broke himself of the habit, its effect upon his health was such that in 1872 his sanity was in question. He died near Margate.
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti |
The eldest of the Pre-Raphaelite school of artists and poets, Rossetti was himself both painter and poet. In art, as in poetry, he broke away from convention when he saw fit. His poetical works are small in bulk, consisting of two slight volumes, Poems (1870) and Ballads and Sonnets (1881).
Of the high quality of these poems there can be little question. With a little more breadth of view, and with perhaps more of the humane element in him, he might have found a place among the very highest. For he had real genius, and in The Blessed Damozel his gifts are fully displayed: a gift for description of almost uncanny splendour, a brooding and passionate introspection, often of a religious nature, and a verbal beauty as studied and melodious as that of Tennyson - less certain and decisive perhaps, but surpassing that of the older poet in unearthly suggestiveness. In his ballads, like Rose Mary and Troy Town, the same powers are apparent, though in a lesser degree; these have in addition a power of narrative that is only a very little short of the greatest.