Edited by Jan Marsh
The leading light of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) is best known today for his vivid, sensuous pictures. But he was drawn to both poetry and painting from boyhood, and after early successes aimed to pursue a dual career. Alongside his paintings and drawings, he produced original verse and an acclaimed volume of translations from Italian authors.
Frequently anthologized, Rossetti's literary works have long been unavailable in their collected form. This new edition brings together everything published in his lifetime, including the early pre-Raphaelite tale 'Hand and Soul' and Rossetti's critical defence of his "fleshly" poems. It also includes his translation of Dante's 'Vita Nuova' together with a selection from his English versions of Guido Cavalcanti, which introduced Ezra Pound to the medieval literature which formed the basis of his career.
This collected writings allows the reader to enter the world of pre-Raphaelite poetry, to study the interaction between verbal and visual art, and to assess Rossetti's place in the canon of Victorian literature.
