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“... incorporating most of the best of his critical work, he re-reads poems by Keats, Blake, Coleridge, Christina Rossetti and other 19th-century writers, as both a critical interpreter and a cultural historian who pays unusually close attention to format and circumstance. Working in the American academy, McGann responds to its changing sub-cultures: by 1990 ...”

“... in the Paradiso. Beatrice is constantly wreathed in smiles, as the sinister saying goes. Christina Rossetti, in a note to one of her poems, complains that both Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura ‘have come down to us resplendent with charms, but … scant of attractiveness’. These smiles at least partly offset that ...”

“... or home away from home, to the Hilltop set, a group that included Conan Doyle, Shaw, Tennyson and Christina Rossetti. The town was modern, fashionably suburban and connected by a new railway line to London, just close enough for something of fashion and suggestions of sex. Richard Le Gallienne, one of Aubrey Beardsley’s friends, ‘raced about the ...”

“... Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-38), Caroline Norton (1808-77), Christina Rossetti (1830-94) and Mary Cowden Clarke (1809-98), are hardly as daring but equally morbid. Lesbianism (nice or nasty) be damned – they ‘remember’ Sappho solely as the maundering, soul-baffled lover of Phaon. This, for Prins, is the most ...”

“... born in: Arnold, as one would expect, given Housman’s lifelong admiration for him, but Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and Swinburne all find their way into his always unostentatiously allusive lyrics. It is also interesting to discover, in a life devoted, as it were, to pagans, Housman’s unbelieving devotion to the Bible. When John Sparrow sent him a ...”

“... you could almost drink/To know how jewels taste’. She has sometimes been read as a latter-day Christina Rossetti, but attempts to place her in this lineage are a little strained, and in her poetry the word ‘heaven’ always arrives with a sense of let-down. The only thing Mew wants to be everlasting is transience; angels envy mortals rather than ...”

“... is so honourable as his exertions on behalf of dead poets unjustly neglected: Smart, Clare, Christina Rossetti and (late, but significantly) Gurney. He has, I think, every right to complain that other men of letters have less consistently reviewed the canon, so as to revise it continually – which is the only way to keep it alive. To be sure, on ...”

“... in Ruth Fainlight. In a tradition various enough to include Emily Dickinson, Mary Coleridge, Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew, her poetry gets on with itself, not self-absorbed but quite independent. Men poets, it makes one feel, get together too much, have too much of an eye for each other’s points and failings; and women have not shared in ...”

“... Lydia is less intellectual and academic: she did bar work while Christine worked towards a PhD (on Christina Rossetti). When the two of them were roommates she read as constantly as Christine, surrendering to narrative but still somehow capricious: ‘she closed the books mostly without comment, or with a snap judgment uttered with finality: dull, or ...”

“... from organised religion. ‘Ah! If you were only like Miss Barbara Smith!’ Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to his pious and retiring sister Christina. She must have shuddered at the thought. Ironically, however, Barbara owed her extraordinary confidence and energy to her father. Bessie Parkes, her lifelong ...”