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History of English Literature

Notes beyond the aesthetic surface, to which he, like the painters, aggressively draws attention. One
must mention the Browninesque element in Pre-Raphaelite poetry because it appears intermittently
all the way up to Hopkins in self-consciously difficult language, the dramatic monologue, and
elaborate applications of biblical typology.
Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism, nonetheless, has most in common with the poets of this group, all of
whom draw upon the poetic continuum that descends from Spenser through Keats and Tennyson
upon the poetic line, in other words, that emphasizes lush vowel sounds, sensuous description,
subjective psychological states, elaborate personification, and complex poetic forms, such as the
sestina, borrowed from Italian and Provencal love poetry.
The Pre-Raphaelite movement, which was initiated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the mid-nineteenth
century, was originally not a literary but an artistic movement. Rossetti, himself a painter (and a
poet as well), felt that contemporary paintings had become too formal, academic, and unrealistic.
He desired to see it taken back to the realism, sensuousness, and devotion to detail which characterize
the art of the Italian painters before Raphael. Raphael (1483-1520) was, no doubt, an excellent and
noted painter of his day, but Rossetti and his ilk perhaps rightly thought that he had started the
movement towards academism in art. Led by Rossetti some painters organised themselves in
London in 1848 into a group which came to be called the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” Apart
from Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Millais, Thomas Woolner, and James Collinson were
the important members of this group. In painting, they broke the shackles of stereotyped traditions.
Like Rousseau they affected “a return to Nature” by giving up the bulk of traditionalized
sophistication which had accumulated over the centuries after Raphael. The creed of the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood was “an entire adherence to the simplicity of art.” Ruskin, who came to
champion the cause of the Pre-Raphaelites in the teeth of severe opposition, said that “they imitate
no pictures: they paint from nature only.” And again: “Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background
is painted to the last touch in the open air from the thing itself...Every minute accessory is painted
in the same manner.” And when he said this, he said a great deal. The anti-conventionalism of the
Pre-Raphaelites marks them as neo-romantics.

20.1 Literary Repercussions

Rossetti and some other members of the Brotherhood were both painters and poets. Consequently,
Pre-Raphaelitism, not remaining confined to painting, made itself felt in English poetry. The
qualities which distinguished Pre-Raphaelite painting also characterised Pre-Raphaelite poetry.
In poetry the movement came in the shape of a revolt against contemporary poetry of the kind of
Tennyson’s which was full of tradition and involved in the immediate, mundane problems of
contemporary society. To justify their ideas, the Brotherhood started a periodical publication, The
Germ, which did not, however, extend beyond four numbers. As an organised group the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood ceased to exist beyond the early 1850’s. But with the meeting of Rossetti
and William Morris in 1856,’the movement was revitalised. Other poets like Swinburne, Coventry
Patmore, and Austin Dobson also came under Rossetti’s influence. But they did not go unattacked.
Robert Buchanan came out with a stinging onslaught on what he considered was the indecently
erotic nature of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. This attack was delivered in his article The Fleshly School
of Poetry.

Notes Rossetti and Swinburne were quick to join issues with him, and the result was a fair
mass of polemics.

20.2 The Antecedents of Pre-Raphaelitism

Before we discuss the features of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, it will be profitable to cast a glance at the
antecedents of Pre-Raphaelitism. First, of course, was the work of thirteenth-century Italian poets,

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