D. G. Rossetti and William Morris

Abstract

D. G. Rossetti and William Morris Florence Boos (bio) D. G. Rossetti Last year's publications on Dante Rossetti and William Morris were fewer than usual, but nonetheless in aggregate, these offer new insights and approaches. For Rossetti, Fergus McGhee's "Rossetti's Giorgione and the Victorian 'Cult of Vagueness' " (Cambridge Quarterly 50, no. 3 [2021]: 279–295) identifies an important aspect of Rossetti's aesthetic as expressed in his essay "Hand and Soul": a commitment to what he called "definite vagueness," a precise impression of unknowability. After noting the importance of this concept to several of Rossetti's contemporaries, including Edgar Allan Poe, McGhee illuminates ways in which Rossetti's sonnet "A Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione; in the Louvre" is specifically designed to evoke a mood of haziness, mutability, and indefinability that he associated with the Renaissance Venetian concept of vaghezza. McGhee notes that Rossetti's paintings for pictures are, in fact, characterized by a lack of correspondence between the painting and its accompanying poem, so much so that for his early poems-cum-pictures, he originally wrote out prose descriptions. McGhee demonstrates that Rossetti's revisions were carefully designed to increase this sense of elusiveness, and he differs with earlier critics who place the poem within an ekphrastic tradition. Instead, Rossetti's sonnet, through its several changes in tone and speaker, creates a sense of shifting intimacy and distance, relying "for the complexity of its effect upon a continuous tussle between inner and outer perspectives," avoiding the grandiose or unearthly transcendent effect sought by many others in favor of something "fragile, tangible, near at hand" (p. 289). In "Rossetti Reconsidered: Dante's Vita Nuova and Its Paths to Canonization in Victorian Literary Culture" (Le tre corone 8 [2021]: 1–164), Frederica Coluzzi places Rossetti's well-known 1861 translation of his The Early Italian Poets within the context of the other creative and critical Dantean translations and reappropriations that flourished between the 1840s and 1880s. She notes the distinctive features of Rossetti's edition, whose more than two hundred poems had been carefully collated from British Museum materials including chronicles, anthologies, and imperfect poetic texts representing varied styles, periods, and dialects. Rossetti had scrupulously sought the opinions of [End Page 395] his literary friends and contacts, including Tennyson, Ruskin, William Allingham, Charles Eliot Norton, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and his careful arrangements sought to replicate the melodies of the originals, as well as providing the first overview of the development of early Italian poetry and its influence on Dante. He had not been alone, however, for in 1860, the American Charles Eliot Norton had issued a New Life of Dante Alighieri that included his own translation of the Vita Nuova with extensive commentaries, and shortly after the publication of Rossetti's volume, Theodore Martin issued another version of The Vita Nuova of Dante (1862) in a less expensive annotated edition. Reviewers appreciated the fact that Rossetti's anthology provided an original history of the formation of an Italian national literature, but sales were modest. Rossetti then issued a new edition in 1874 under the title Dante and His Circle, rearranging its contents to emphasize its importance for the study of this increasingly popular poet. The material in Coluzzi's valuable account of the distinctive features of Rossetti's work and his relationship to predecessors and competitors might well have been included in her Dante Beyond Influence, reviewed shortly, since to fully understand the topic, one would need to read both works. A further topic might also merit attention: the extent to which Rossetti recast the original texts of his non-Dantean translations. He had prepared translations of Blake's poems for The Life of William Blake (2 vols., 1863) as a favor to Anne Gilchrist, who was then editing her late husband Alexander's work for publication, and although Rossetti's versions are arguably distinctive creative works in their own right, they differ significantly from the versions prepared by more recent Blake editors. Frederica Coluzzi's Dante Beyond Influence: Rethinking Reception in Victorian Literary Culture (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2021) approaches the issue of translation and reception more broadly. She concentrates on the years 1865–1921 as manifesting a...