Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems

Anglican Theological Review, Winter 2003 by Middleton, David

Admired by Hopkins and Swinburne, an influence-"Goblin Market"-on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and spoken of by some in 1892 as a possible successor to Tennyson as poet laureate, Christina Rossetti has emerged completely now from her brother Dante Gabriel's shadow as an important poet in her own right. This enhanced status as a significant nineteenth-century English poet is due in large part to the decades-long labor of the textual editor R. W. Crump, whose three-volume edition of Rossetti's complete poems (1979-1990) is the text presented here.

As Betty Flowers says in her introduction, "Now, over a hundred years since her death, Rossetti is assuming a much more important place in the history of English poetry." Flowers is also right to note that Rossetti often writes well of love, of the loss or refusal of love, and of the loss of youth and beauty. But the assertion that although "in her outer life, Rossetti chose to submit to the discipline of religion, her essential independence of spirit shines through her work" needs qualifying. Christina Rossetti is one of the great devotional poets in the rich Anglican tradition of such poets. Her faith and her poetic virtues are inseparable. This well-annotated and reasonably priced edition of R. W. Crump's painstakingly accurate text of all known poems by Rossetti now allows readers to make this discovery for themselves.

David Middleton

Thibodaux, Louisiana