The Columbia History of British Poetry (118 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
7.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 478
Pre-Raphaelite Poetry
Carole Silver
Perhaps no Victorian critical term has been more analyzed and debated in recent years than
Pre-Raphaelite
. Critics have argued that it is an essentially meaningless literary designation, yet have gone on to defend it as necessarywhether as an art-historical concept that offers a convenient way of grouping literary figures (in Cecil Lang's view) or as a signifier of overt Romantics among the Victorians (according to Harold Bloom). In art-historical circles there is more agreement about the meaning of the term, although recent feminist and cultural materialist commentators have sensibily argued that Pre-Raphaelitism, like other tendencies in art, cannot be separated from the society which engendered it or from that society's politics, economics, and history. Moreover, they have suggested that there is none of the monolithic and unifying linkage of style and purpose which generally characterizes a "movement."
But if there are general tendencies that connect a group of Victorian painters ranging from William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Coley Burne-Jones, it must be asked what relations these figures and their works bear to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne as poets. Is there something that links these poets to each other, that gives their work a special flavorone different in kind or degree from that of their contemporaries?
The Victorians, at least, thought they could identify one. For them, the term
Pre-Raphaelite
referred initially to a group of young painters who in 1848, reacting against what they perceived as the dictates of Sir
 
Page 479
Joshua Reynold's
Discourses
and the practices of the Royal Academy based on them, attempted to change the nature of English painting. The original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood consisted of James Collinson (best known as Christina Rossetti's suitor), Hunt, Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti (the chronicler of the group), Frederic George Stephens (later an art critic), and Thomas Woolner (a sculptor). The brothers had no clear aesthetic manifesto except the all-encompassing generalization that, unlike painters creating brown "slosh" in compositions based on pyramidal structure, they would "follow nature"paint things as they really areand return in spirit to the truth of vision held by artists before Raphael. William Michael Rossetti, recreating the movement in 1895, argues that the bond of union among the first brotherhood was (1) ''to have genuine ideas to express"; (2) "to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them (3) to sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional"; and (4) "to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues." This, of course, says little, except that the band was united in knowing what it did
not
want to produceconventional, superficial genre or history pieces.
The Victorian public immediately identified certain traits in painting as Pre-Raphaelite: preternaturally vivid colors (perhaps in reaction to the fog and smog of Victorian London); subjects often drawn from lesser-known literary sources such as the works of John Keats (whose biography by Monckton Milnes appeared in 1848); compositions filled with incident that took more than the usual care to decipher; static, unidealized, even ugly figures; clear, sharp outlines; and a perspective best described as "peculiar." Perhaps most obviously, Pre-Raphaelitism in painting meant typology and symbolism.
Describing a lady in Charlotte Yonge's novel
Heartsease
(1853), a character sneers: "She is walking prae-raffaelitism herself. Symbols and emblems! . . . Symbolic, suggestive teaching, speaking to the eye. . . ." To those who did not like it, Pre-Raphaelitism was the work of "exceedingly young men of stubborn instincts." Its detractors feared it, on the one hand, as secretly papist or retrograde (it disregarded "modern') principles like perspective and chiaroscuro) or, on the other hand, as excessively democratic, reeking of the mobocracy so threatening in the era of Chartism and the revolutions of 1848.
Some, including Charles Dickens, thought the movement almost immoral in depictingas Millais did in
The Carpenter's Shop
a work-
 
Page 480
ing-class Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. Yet for John Ruskin, defending the brotherhood in "Pre-Raphaelitism," it meant serious, moral art, religious in its truth, and for David Masson, writing in 1852, it was a cross between naturalism or realism and the spiritual and imaginative seen in "things as they really are." For most ordinary folk, it was a matter of complex symbolic detail and brilliant, even garish color.
In literatureand the term was quickly adapted by Victorian literary critics
Pre-Raphaelitism
signified linguistic archaisms or medievalisms and sharp delineation and specificity in visual detail. Masson defined Pre-Raphaelite verse as created by the same "feeling" as the painting, but as going beyond the simplicity of Wordsworth to the even more archaic simplicity of Dante and his circle. Detractors, like Robert Browning, made it a dysphemism for effeminacy, affectation, and archaizing. In accusing Dante Gabriel Rossetti of engendering "the fleshly school of poetry," in his pamphlet on the subject (1871), Robert Buchanan further defined Pre-Raphaelite poetry, specifically that of D. G. Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne. To him,
Pre-Raphaelite
meant overblown poetry, hysterical in tone and excessive in style; it signaled its unwholesomeness by valuing expression over thought, style over content, sound over sense, and body over soul. To another critic, writing in
Macmillan's Magazine
in 1880, it was equally unsavoryrepresenting ''a sick indifference to the things of our own time, and a spurious devotion to whatever is foreign, exotic, archaic or grotesque."
We in the twentieth century have amplified the movement's characteristics. Most critics accept the idea of a widening circle of influence, an accumulation of artistic and literary impulses connected by what T. S. Eliot called "a continuity of admiration." The first brotherhood, lasting from 1848 till 1853, privileged painting over poetry; it believed in truth to nature and truth to imagination as coequal principles. The dominant forces in this formative phase were Holman Hunt, flying the banner of truth to natureand intricate, deeply felt, Protestant religious typologyand Gabriel Rossetti, with his tendency toward medievalism, Dantesque faith and ideal love, and truth to the inner eye.
Its organ was a famous but short-lived periodical called the
Germ
(1850), which survived for only four issues, yet is an ancestor of today's "little magazines." While the
Germ
was full of thoroughly forgettable verse like Thomas Woolner's "My Beautiful Lady," a pseudomedieval praise of the beloved most noteworthy for Hunt's fine illustrations of it, it also contained significant literary works. Dante Gabriel Rossetti con-
 
Page 481
tributed a tale of his vision of art, "Hand and Soul," and seven important poems, including versions of "My Sister's Sleep," and ''The Blessed Damozel." Christina Rossetti, age eighteen, contributed seven more, including "Dream Land" and "Repining." The group was clearly a brotherhooda bonding of close male friends with women excluded; it involved an idea of communality; brothers read aloud their own and others' literary work, edited and revised together, chose subjects in common to paint, and discussed and debated concerns held by all. But by 1853, as Christina Rossetti noted in verse, the brotherhood was "in its decadence."
The second Pre-Raphaelite circle is more amorphous, but still in essence a brotherhood. Lasting from 1856 to about 1865, it was dominated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and consisted of younger disciples, including William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and, by 1857, Algernon Charles Swinburne. Because he once shared rent with two members of the circle, George Meredith has been counted among the Pre-Raphaelites. Yet neither the private, evolutionary religion manifested in poems like "The Woods of Westermain" nor the "modern" guilt and self-examination of "Modern Love" justifies his inclusion. Even before they met Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones, and their college friends had created a magazine in imitation of the
Germ, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
(1856). This journal, originally to be called
The Brotherhood
, celebrated the earlier group both by including in its pages Burne-Jones's laudatory review of the
Germ
and the works by Hunt and D. G. Rossetti in it, and by printing versions of Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," "Staff and Scrip," and "Burden of Nineveh." The second brotherhood also stressed communal work and spirit, although some of its concerns differed from those of the first group. The differences were not based solely on Rossetti's powerful, if changing, influence but also on the fact that England itself had changed between 1848 and 1856.
The hungry forties, the revolutions on the continent and the Chartists at home, the religious fervor of the Tractarians and the evangelical passion of their opponents, the belief in the imminence of changeall of which had touched the first brotherhoodwere over. Talk of revolution had subsided to chat about reform, and the hegemony of the middle class made the possibility of change seem more remote. The second brotherhood's "Crusade and Holy Warfare against the age" took the form of trying to escape its era's materialism and complacency and of attempting to evade or to comment only indirectly on the political and economic problems of the golden 1850s.
 
Page 482
By the time of the gradual dissolution of the second group, in the mid-1860s, Pre-Raphaelitism was very much a broad-ranging movement and a broad-ranging term in both painting and literature. What we in the twentieth century now describe as "visual Pre-Raphaelitism" is closely related to what we might define as Pre-Raphaelite in poetry. The traits of the visual compositions are definite contours, brilliant contrasting colors, minute detail (carefully delineated in backgrounds as well as in foregrounds), flatness or two-dimensionality, with texts and subjects designed to bear symbolic meaning, whether that of religious typology or private symbolism. These traits create heavily patterned, compartmentalized works, demanding because they cannot be interpreted in a momentary or single look. The paintings are dense and somewhat mysterious, like multiple point of view in literature, while, like dramatic monologues, they demand that viewers participate in their somewhat ambiguous lives.
Pre-Raphaelite poetry shares with Pre-Raphaelite painting its intensity, its prevailing tones or moods, and much of its subject matter, especially its perpetual gaze at women, its obsession with frustrated and separated love, and its preoccupation with death. Like many of the paintings, the poems utilize dream, providing accounts of actual dreams and using the language, distortion, fragmentation, symbolization, and essential uninterpretability of the dream experience. Through the use of hyperclarity Pre-Raphaelite poets tend to render nature unnatural, whether in creating imaginary landscapes or in examining microscopically what the eye cannot ordinarily see.
These tendencies, as well as the more obvious conventions they developthe reiterated descriptions of the female form, divine and diabolic, the interchangeability of the imageries of religious and erotic experience, the preference for settings other than the Victorian and the imbuing of them with the realism of a contemporary scene, the use of the preternatural and folkloric, the attempt to fuse the "real" and the visionaryare indeed present in other Victorian poems, but they dominate Pre-Raphaelite poetry. To them the brothers add a special concern for the interaction of poetry and paintingnot just a matter of "word-painting" (for that would make Tennyson the true Pre-Raphaelite and remove the later works of the brothers from the canon)but an attempt to break out of the boundaries of each medium, to emulate in a sonnet, for example, the condition of a painting.
The work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a case in point, although it must be remembered that he made his living as a painter, and that he
 
Page 483
produced only two volumes of original poetry,
Poems
(1870) and
Ballads and Sonnets
(1881). Prior to the volume of 1870, he had earned something of a reputation by translating the poems of the
dolce stil nuovo
, that is, of Dante and his forebears and contemporaries, in
Early Italian Poets
(1861). Here he had demonstrated his Pre-Raphaelitism by reaching back before Petrarch, the Raphael of Italian poetry, to the roots of Italian literary art. Rossetti was most drawn to the
Vita Nuova
; in Dante he found images and conventions fresher and "truer" than those of Petrarchanism, as well as an idealization of love and a paean to its cosmic power. Perhaps Dante also provided him with models for poems full of minute specificity and symbolic atmosphere, poems that suggest the factuality of the mystical.
Within the narratives, ballads, and numerous sonnets that form the corpus of Rossetti's poetry, there are conventionally Pre-Raphaelite works. These are poemssometimes influenced by Keats or Coleridgethat achieve their effect through accumulations of specific, closely observed detail, foregrounded so that it veils or deflects the poems' central emphasis and produces a static, highly pictorial effect. Among these are the unfinished "Bride's Prelude" (1848) in which the bride, Alöyse, confesses her fall to her virginal sister, Amelotte, amid remarkable images of heat, sound, and silence. Through most of the poem Alöyse sits statuelike, head turned sideways, while Amelotte kneels in shock at her sister's revelations.
The picture is so carefully particularized that we see the reflections on Amelotte's silver belt and count the pearls that adorn Alöyse's vest. The surreal, dreamlike quality of the poem comes from this technique combined with the evocation of the heat and tension in the room in which the poem is set. The sun is bright enough to etch "the track / Of her [Amelotte's] still shadow sharp and black." The air is so still "that Amelotte / Heard far beneath the plunge and float / Of a hound swimming in the moat." The seemingly irrelevant, naturalistic detail of the dog's swim adds to the sense of heat, airlessness, and pitiless light; the specifics collaborate to create a sense of agoraphobia and claustrophobia analogous to the Bride's account of a passion now turned hellish.
When Gabriel Rossetti wishes to do so, he can particularize with the best, demonstrating in "Jenny" how dawn "creeps in" to the prostitute's room "Past the gauze curtains half drawn-to / And the lamp's doubled shade grows blue," or depicting with the same scientific dispassion the ugliness of a place where

Other books

Healed by Fire by Catherine Banks
Caribou Crossing by Susan Fox
Lush by Jenika Snow
White Mare's Daughter by Judith Tarr
Dressed to Kill by Campbell Black
The Empty Ones by Robert Brockway
DarklyEverAfter by Allistar Parker
The Old Deep and Dark by Ellen Hart