The Pre-Raphaelite Poetry

The Pre-Raphaelite movement was started by two German painters based in Rome in 1810. The movement drew inspiration from Italian painters before Raphael such as Giotto, Bellini, and Fra Angelico. The movement was concerned with the art of painting. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics. It was formed in England in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Michael Rosetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member “Brotherhood” modeled in part on the Nazarene movement. The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and John William Waterhouse.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in September 1848, is the most significant British artistic grouping of the nineteenth century. Its fundamental mission was to purify the art of its time by returning to the example of medieval and early Renaissance painting. Although the life of the brotherhood was short, the broad international movement it inspired, Pre-Raphaelitism, persisted into the twentieth century and profoundly influenced the aesthetic movement, symbolism, and the Arts and Crafts movement.

Firstly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), in which passages of striking naturalism were situated within a complex symbolic composition. Already a published poet, Rossetti inscribed verse on the frame of his painting. In the following year, Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) was exhibited at the Royal Academy to an outraged critical reception. The master of a brilliantly naturalistic technique, Millais represented biblical figures with closely observed portrayals of the features of real, imperfect models. In 1850 the Pre-Raphaelites also produced a literary and artistic magazine, the Germ, which was something of a manifesto for their artistic concerns and ran for only four issues.

From the first, the Pre-Raphaelites aspired to paint subjects from modern life. In The Awakening Conscience (1854), Hunt represented a kept woman realizing the error of her ways, and in 1852 Madox Brown began the most ambitious of all Pre-Raphaelite scenes from modern life, Work (1852–1865). Although the brotherhood included no women, Christina Rossetti, sister of Dante and William, pioneered a Pre-Raphaelite style in poetry, and Elizabeth Siddall-model, muse,
and eventually wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti-produced distinctive watercolors and drawings that went unrecognized in her lifetime but received critical attention after the advent of feminist art history in the late 1970s.

Another element in Pre-Raphaelite poetry is perceived in love for beauty. The Pre-Raphaelite poets are lovers of beauty. Here they are the followers of the great poetic creed of Keats. In their rich sensuousness, they are also found to carry on the tradition of great romantic poetry. They are also found to be medievalistic in their attachment to the medieval past. This also constitutes another romantic aspect of Pre-Raphaelitism. Their attempt to follow Byron’s revolutionary spirit and Shelley’s inspiration for loveliness does not appear to have much succeeded, yet these elements are not ignorable in them. Pre-Raphaelite poetry, in this respect, appears to be the second phase of Romanticism in the nineteenth century. This, however, appears to lack in humanism and the idealistic vision of human life, so much marked in romantic poetry. The Pre-Raphaelite poets aimed at infusing the art and spirit of the Pre-Raphaelite painters into poetry.