Search Results

“... Christina Rossetti wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and: I bent by my own burden, must Enter my heart of dust. Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry”, and such I will back against all skilled labour ...”

“... life. For her, too, love-regret could be an absorbing and solitary game. Not so, one feels, for Christina Rossetti, whose love poems may equally be sphinxes without any real secret, and yet with no hint of fantasy or teasing. They are always grave and unselfconscious, impersonal, calm both with sorrow and with belief. Those heavy-lidded Italian eyes ...”

“... forms of gratifying and/or punishing themselves. The union of Frances Polidori and Gabriele Rossetti, parents to Maria, William, Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, was by all accounts harmonious, affectionate, enduring. Eccentric, not without drama (he was a poet and revolutionary in exile from Italy), it ...”

“... to scorn his heart,’ sniffed Charlotte in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. ‘Woman must obey,’ Christina Rossetti wrote in 1879. ‘Her office is to be man’s helpmeet.’ These are not popular sentiments in the 1990s. Yet no one would wish to deny the intelligence, courage or reforming imagination of these women. Valerie Sanders approaches her ...”

“... Safe in his excavated gallery Christina Rossetti Lady Lassetter sits at her mirror; presented as a woodland frieze in May, her drapery is appliquéd with specimens of British botany. On the dresser’s marbled top a signed invitation can explain this flowered and zoomorphic frock, designed to be a favourite verse sartorialised ...”

“... But in the second or antinomian tradition, ‘Coleridge of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, and Rossetti in all his writings, made what Arnold has called that “morbid effort”, that search for “perfection of thought and feeling, and to unite this to perfection of form”, sought this new, pure beauty, and suffered in their lives because of it.’ Yeats ...”

“... which doesn’t change, the book isn’t chronologically arranged, and the earliest piece, Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’, comes last of all. Placed there, it seems like a magical explanation of all that goes before. Christina Rossetti herself said that her poem was not to be taken as an ...”

“... looseness to cover everything from Browning’s dramatic monologues and the religious lyrics of Christina Rossetti to Arthur Clough’s The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich(1848), James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874) and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1904-8). Though she has been considerably influenced by recent theorising, both linguistic and ...”

“... forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to Proust: ‘By his impressionism I mean his non-logical ...”

“... is salvation or a suburban mansion, the game of life is there to be won, and won on your own.Christina Rossetti’s poems dwell on those who are unable to play. Lives are ‘void and brief/And tedious in the barren dusk’ or have been misspent and regretted. Souls are unreachable and unregarded: ‘living unloved’, her Sappho hopes only ‘to die ...”

“... of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith. I would think a life of diverse affections could be made upon such affiliations. But Grigson seems to need to be enraged or disgusted, too. Else why would he go to the ...”

“... moreover, were good at providing spiritual resources. Van Gogh had a particular fondness for Christina Rossetti, for Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ and for Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. There was an interplay between metropolitan modernity and ‘noble and healthy sentiment’ that was peculiar to England, he suggested in letters to a Dutch ...”

“... masterpieces’ printed in full, the others being FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’. (The list has attracted comment: it is clearly polemical, and reviewers who objected to ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ as lightweight were exposing the very prejudice its ...”

“... father, Swynfen Jervis, was a country gentleman, a Radical MP and scholar; both Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti knew the family, where their father had also been a tutor. Agnes was the eldest child; she lost her mother young and had two stepmothers. Rossetti, a boy of 12 when he knew her, admired her looks and her ...”

“... of their politics – their engagements with Irish matters, for instance, or, in the case of Christina Rossetti, her ‘indirect ... objection to Tennyson’s style’ and the ‘peculiar conjunction’ there ‘of military, industrial, and masculine sexual values’. This works brilliantly as explication de texte in an entirely classical sense. But ...”