Graphic. Punctuation
Phonetic Stylistic Devices
English Vocabulary
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Biographies
Rossetti, Christina (Georgina) 1830 – 94 Poet. The sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti, she was born in London and educated at home by her mother. She showed early promise as a poet, and her grandfather had small collections printed when she was 12 and 15. She was a delicate and religious girl, her devotion to High Anglicanism later moulding much of her finest verse. Her religious convictions seem also to have caused the eventual collapse of her prolonged engagement to the Pre-Raphaelite painter James Collinson.Christina Rossetti’s lyrics ‘An End’ and ‘Dream Lane’ were published in the first number of The Germ (1850) under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne. She contributed further poems to this and other journals. Her first major collection was Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), followed in 1866 by The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. Sing Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872) was illustrated by Arthur Hughes. By the 1880s bouts of ill health had made her an invalid, but she continued to write and publish. A Pageant and Other Poems (1881) contained the sonnet sequence ‘Monna Innominata’, celebrating the superiority of divine love over human passion, while
Her verse is remarkable for its love of verbal invention and of metrical experiment. In both her religion and her secular poetry she shows a keen interest in natural, pictorial imagery, while her addresses to an unnamed lover or suitor suggest both a determination and a carefully controlled ambiguity. Her delicate, frank meditations on death and Heaven are balanced by the imaginative vigour of poems like Goblin Market.
