The question as to who in the nineteenth century may qualify as a Pre-Raphaelite remains a contested one. But it is not the project of this book to settle that question or to come up with a new catalogue of Pre-Raphaelite poets. At issue, rather, is what we might term a Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, present in the work of a number of poets and painters and in several cases one that extended beyond a ‘first’ or ‘second’ generation of writers and artists. Faithful to the nature and scope of this series I have chosen to re-think Pre-Raphaelite poetry, beginning with its relation to the work of Ruskin, principally through the figures of Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Simeon Solomon. Of these, D. G. Rossetti gets the most page-time by virtue of the fact that not only was he a key founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and a magnetic personality around whom other artists and writers clustered, but also because more than any other figure he newly focused the interrelationship of poetry and painting, a take on the sister-arts analogy, that remains the most innovative and enabling legacy of the movement.

While it may not have been novel in the nineteenth century to twin a poem with a picture, or to aspire to work in the dual realms of language and paint, the Pre-Raphaelites took up the correspondence between visual and verbal, revising the sisterarts analogy to new aesthetic and political ends. By the same token, Ruskin and D. G. Rossetti may not immediately strike us as a likely, or sympathetic, pairing (Ruskin reputedly fastidious, abstemious; Rossetti: bohemian, indulgent) but Ruskin supported Rossetti at a vital time in his career, recognizing that his unusual talent did not lie chiefly in the sphere of artistic technique in which he was surpassed by John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt. In his links with Rossetti, Ruskin also realized a profound psychological connection through love and loss, through mourning and a desire for resurrection. These motives haunt both men and underpin aspects of Pre- Raphaelitism that morphed into those subsequently recognizably Symbolist creations of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.