Collected Writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Works - Hardcover

Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings and drawings are much better known today than his poetry, yet he didn't think of himself as an artist in the first instance. "My own belief," he wrote, "is that I am a poet primarily, and that it is my poetic tendencies that chiefly give value to my pictures." Painting made him money, but what he called "unprostituted" artistic impulses into his verse. Given the power and beauty of so much of Rossetti's poetry, and the range of influence he exerted on a variety of writers, from his own contemporaries as well as 20th-century figures like TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, it is nothing short of astonishing that there is no complete edition of his writing in print at the moment. Jan Marsh's handsome single volume, published as a companion to her excellent biography Dante Gabriel Rossetti,rectifies this situation superbly. All Rossetti's poems, and a number of examples of short fiction and critical writing, are here, including the whole of "The House of Life" (1880), poems published posthumously and unpublished notebook fragments. Marsh provides a short but useful introduction, and her notes are efficient and lucid, providing necessary elucidation in a spare manner that doesn't distract from the verse itself. The bibliography is to-the-point and helpful (although a strange modesty has resulted in the omission of Marsh's own biography from the listings). The whole thing is as excellent a showcase for Rossetti's poetic genius as could be conceived: Marsh manages to avoid falling into the trap that snares too many editors these days, where the author becomes merely a pretext for foisting editorial opinions and attitudes. This is a Rossetti designed to be read, and not before time. --Adam Roberts

The only edition of the vivid and sensuous poetry and prose published by Rossetti in his lifetime.