{\b Dante Gabriel Rossetti}.

{\b Date of Birth}.: 12 May 1828

{\b Date of Death}.: 9 April 1884

Work
As a poet and painter, as well as a translator, Rossetti spent much of his 
life, often painting on literary themes or, for example, illustrating such 
volumes as Lord Tennyson's Poems (1857), hesitating between painting and 
poetry. His poems were first published in 1850 in 'The Germ', the journal of 
the famous Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that he had set up, along with six 
others, in 1848. These included The Blessed Damosel, My Sister's Sleep and a 
piece of prose writing entitled Hand and Soul. He only published again almost 
twenty years later with the appearance of sixteen sonnets in 'The Fortnightly 
Review' in 1869. This was followed by a volume of Poems (1870) that included 
the first part of what is sometimes referred to as his masterpiece, The House 
of Life. The second work to appear in 1881, again with another volume entitled 
Poems (1881), in which Rossetti chiefly rearranged earlier works, was Ballads 
and Sonnets in which The House of Life was completed and forty-seven new 
sonnets and some historical ballads added. Other important works are 
Rossetti's response made to a criticism of the Pre-Raphaelite school, The 
Stealthy School of Criticism that appeared in 'The Athanaeum' in 1872, and the 
translations of Dante, Dante and His Circle (1874), and Villon.

{\b Featured Works}.

'The Woodspurge', 'The Sea Limits', 'Sudden Light', 'Sibylla Palmifera', 
'Dream-Love', 'Dream-Land', 'Death's Songsters', 'A Superscription', 'Broken 
Music', 'The Choice, III', 'The Choice, I', 'The Choice, II', 'The House of 
Life: Introductory Sonnet', 'A Sea-Spell', 'For Our Lady of the Rocks by 
Leonardo Da Vinci', 'The Blessed Damozel', 'My Sister's Sleep'.

{\b General Comment}.

Rossetti was born, the son of an Italian patriot and political refugee and an 
English mother, in England. He was raised in an environment of cultural and 
political activity that, it has been suggested, was of more import to his 
learning than his formal education. This latter was constituted by a general 
education at King's College from 1836 to 1841 and, following drawing lessons 
at a school in central London at the age of fourteen, some time as a student 
at the Royal Academy from 1845 onwards. Here he studied painting with  William 
Hollman Hunt and John Everett Millais who, in 1848, would set up the 
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with Rossetti, Rossetti's younger brother and three 
other students.

The school's aspirations, in this its first incarnation, was to paint true to 
nature: a task pursued by way of minute attention to detail and the practice 
of painting out of doors. Rossetti's principal contribution to the Brotherhood 
was his insistence on linking poetry and painting, no doubt inspired in part 
by his earlier and avaricious readings of Keats, Shakespeare, Goethe, Sir 
Walter Scott, Byron, Edgar Allan Poe and, from 1847 onwards, the works of 
William Blake.

'The Germ' lasted however for only four issues, all published in 1850. In 1854 
Rossetti met and gained an ally in the art critic John Ruskin and, two years 
later, meetings with Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris set a second phase 
of the Brotherhood into movement.

In 1860 Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal, also a writer and a painter, whom 
he had met ten years earlier in 1850. But, by this time she was an invalid 
and, after giving birth to a stillborn child, she died just two years later of 
a laudanum overdose. Rossetti had her interned with the only extent and 
complete manuscript of his poems, only to have her exhumed seven years later 
in order to retrieve his work. By this time he had moved to Chelsea where he 
was a joint tenant with Swinbourne and Meredith. In 1871 he moved again, this 
time to Kelmscott near Oxford, with William Morris and his wife Jane, the 
other great love of Rossetti's life whom he painted avidly. 

Rossetti collapsed in 1872 after which he never really regained his health. 
The last decade of his life was spent mostly in a state of semi-invalid 
hermitry.