Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais.
In 1850 they also started publishing a journal with
their poems and ideas: The Germ.
The brotherhood as such was short-lived but its
influence and inspiration can be felt until the end
of the century.
Narrative painting
Edward Burne-Jones, The Beguiling of Merlin, 1874
The dignity of work, art, craftsmanship
Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852-65
Landscape and outdoor painting
Richard Redgrave, The Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home, 1858
For us one of the most interesting aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite
movement is the connection between art and literature:
some of the artists were both painters and poets (Dante Gabriel Rossetti)
and others were models and poets (Christina Rossetti) at the same time.
Moreover:
- Artists illustrated edition of contemporary poetry: for example the
Moxon edition of Tennyson’s poems (1857)
- Paintings without title where accompanied by verse
- There are poems and paintings about the same topics:
The Blessed Damozel, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The painting was exhibited at the
Royal Academy in 1851 without
title but with some lines from
Tennyson’s poem Mariana:
She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not’, she said;
She said ‘I am aweary. Aweary –
I would that I were dead’
John Everett Millais, 1851
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s
illustration of his own
poem:
The Blessed Damozel, the
story of a lover who
looks down on her lover
by heaven.
The poem was published
in The Germ, 1850.
Henry Holiday, Dante and Beatrice, 1883
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Beata Beatrix
1864-70
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, 1855
Before reading Ulysses
Tennyson took the subject of one of his best-known poems
from Dante, from the Italian poet’s portrait of Ulysses in his
Inferno.
Ulysses appeared in the Tennyson’s 1842 collection of poems
and it is a dramatic monologue:
What do you know about this poetic form?
What does it allow the poet to do?
Talking about narrative techniques: how is a story told in a
dramatic monologue different from one told in a ballad?
After reading Ulysses
How would you define the tone of the poem?
How would you define Ulysses?
How would you define Telemachus?
Why does Ulysses want to travel more? Where does he
want to go?
Can you infer something about Tennyson’s faith from this
poem?
Think about the Lady of Shalott:
Leaving aside the stylistic differences, would you
say the two poems have a similar tone/theme?
The Lady of Shalott has always been read as a celebration of
artistic isolation. Tennyson revisits the Romantic rejection of
vis-à-vis confrontation with external reality, better expressed
in John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale:
‘ […] for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful death’ (1819)
However, the position of the poet could also be read in the
terms proposed by Armstrong, as the Lady does leave her art
and go out into ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’
(Tennyson, In Memoriam).
We could think about the words of Ash in Possession:
‘Could the Lady of Shalott have written Melusina in her
barred and moated tower?’ (p. 188)
Tennyson has been praised for:
-the musicality of his verse (he was called ‘the lord of language’ and ‘the
finest ear of any English poets)
--being the poet of the people
He has also been heavily criticised and rejected, especially by
modernist poets, for:
--being a discoverer of words rather than ideas
--being the stupidest of the English poets
--being elusive, sentimental, digressive
--being monotonous:
Auden said: ‘there was little about melancholia that he did not know;
there was little else he did’.
Robert Browning
(1812 – 1889)
Before 1860
‘a clumsy barbarian’
‘Mrs Browning’s husband’
After 1860
Recognized as a great poet,
a rival for Tennyson
First meeting 1845
Huge correspondence: 500 letters
Elopement and secret marriage 1846
Life in Italy
Elizabeth’s death 1861
Browning is mostly remembered for his dramatic
monologues. The main collections are:
Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
Men and Women (1855)
Dramatis Personae (1864)
And the longer poem:
The Ring and the Book (1868)
When Browning was buried in Westminster Abbey,
Henry James reflected that many oddities and many
great writers had been buried there ‘but none of the odd
ones have been so great and none of the great ones been
so odd’.
His fame and reputation follow two directions.
A stylistic experimenter
and innovator admired by
modernist poets
A teacher and a philosopher
for many groups of people
who founded Browning
Societies in Britain and
America
Andrea del Sarto
(1486 -1531)
Main source for his life:
Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' più eccellenti
pittori, scultori e architettori, 1550.
Browning wrote the poem in Italy.
It is one of many about people
belonging to the Italian Renaissance.
‘a common greyness
silvers everything’
‘all is silver-grey
Placid and perfect in
my art’
The Madonna of the Harpies, 1517
Oil on wood
Galleria degli Uffizi
This monologue is considered one of the most
accomplished Browning produced.
First of all it is a story, with a plot and characters.
Secondly, it investigates the psychology of the
character.
Thirdly, it provides a vision of art (maybe the
poet’s?)
This is a narrative poem: it tells a story.
Who are the characters?
What about the time and setting of the story?
What about the plot? Can you piece together the
protagonist’s story from the fragments he gives?
What can you say about the fictional time? Is
anachrony used?
The poem provides deep psychological insights by evoking
the tension within the character, the oppositions tearing his
soul. The main contrasts the poem highlights are:
Idealism vs sordid reality
Determinism vs free will
Self-justification vs self-deprecation
Can you find expressions describing these feelings?
Can you find some passages when Andrea contradicts
himself?
Can you find examples of irony?
What is the difference between Leonardo,
Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea himself?
What did they think of him?
Has he obtained fame and glory on earth?
What are the reasons of his failure?
Does he hope to get a compensation in heaven?
Can you identify one sentence that summarises
Browning’s ideas about perfection/ambition (a
kind of declaration of his poetics)?
Summing up...
How is the story told in a dramatic monologue?
How are the characters portrayed?
As a reader, do you think you know more or
less than the characters in the story?
What are the marks of orality?
We have said the dramatic monologue comes
from Elizabethan and Jacobean monologues and
soliloquies. What other literary form does it
remind you of?