Critical Responses to Two Kinds of Pre-Raphaelite Poetry
Thomas J. Tobin

Because of the Pre-Raphaelites’ adherence to the Greek principle of ut pictura poesis, that painting and poertry are sister arts, most of the artists of the original P.R.B. also tried their hands at poetry.  For instance, Thomas Woolner found that he was better suited to be a sculptor, and produced very little poetry, chiefly his entry “My Beautiful Lady” in the first installment of The Germ.  William Holman Hunt also found that his talents lay more in the way of painting, but he praised in Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood the poets whom he thought worthy of emulation: 
Our newer generation had found in Keats, Wordsworth, and Coleridge the mental matter of robust honesty which Henry Taylor, Tennyson, and Browning utilised to teach the manliness and heroism of simple goodness, a basis which Chaucer and the early English poets had made as that upon which our poetry should be built.  (1:326-27)
One of the characteristics of much Pre-Raphaelite poetry is that it is “utilised to teach.”  The poems of the movement often carry implicitly didactic social messages, while other poems hearken nostalgically to the simpler mediæval era through the use of archaic diction and techniques.  The poets themselves were aware of the two different impulses in their poetry (one might term them the “didactic” and the “nostalgic”).  In order to illustrate a curious trend in poetic criticism over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, I will examine the critical response to both of these sorts of poems, addressing four poems from each category.  It matters not whether one examines criticism of didactic or nostalgic poems; the critical opinion with regard to Pre-Raphaelite poetry usually examines the didactic messages of early poems, and gradually shifts toward an emphasis on poetic nostalgia and archaic technique as the century progresses.  

Didactic Poetry

Four poems especially embody the social-reform spirit of Pre-Raphaelitism: Christina Rossetti’s “Uphill” (1858), Dante Rossetti’s “Jenny” (1848-1859), William Morris’ “The Day is Coming” (1884), and Algernon Swinburne’s “The Commonweal:  A Song for Unionists” (1886).  Each of these four poems clearly advocates a change in the reader’s attitude toward the issue at hand, whether salvation in “Uphill,” prostitution in “Jenny,” or allegiance in “The Commonweal.”  The didactic intent in these poems is supported elsewhere by their authors, and the critical press recognizes the didacticism of the early poems, while moving gradually toward emphasizing structural and technical elements in later criticism.  
	Composed in 1858 and published in 1866, Christina Rossetti’s “Uphill” is an exhortation to her readers to lead good Christian lives in the hope of a reward in the afterlife.  Reviews of this poem appear sporadically in American sources, like Catholic World and The Critic, and the British critical press is often silent on many of Christina Rossetti’s works.  Her poems were often given to fashionable lady-reviewers, even though her poems often deal with the same sorts of serious issues as those of her brother Dante (cf. Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti).  
	An 1867 Fortnightly Review article, which states that “[w]ith Miss Rossetti, the thought is generally good, always pure, and chaste, and womanly, and often, though not always, fresh and sparkling” (“A Pageant” 257).  “Uphill,” one of three devotional poems to which the above passage applies, is critiqued according to its didactic message, the effect it has on its readers.  This is to be expected of a poem which appears in print in 1866, relatively early in the history of Pre-Raphaelite poetry.  This is also supported by the September 1866 Saturday Review article on “Miss Rossetti’s Poems,” whose critic comments on the gestalt of “Uphill,” remarking that the verses “have the delicious and truly poetic effect of striking us as things overheard, as if they were the unconscious outcome of the most harmonious moods, in which a hearer is neither suspected nor wished” (322).  Later in the review, the mediæval tone of the collection in which “Uphill” appears is criticized.  Her poetry leaves “too little for the imagination of the onlooker.  The effect is like that of a mediæval picture, with its high horizons and stiff lines and general effect of nearness” (324).  Both of these passages from The Saturday Review indicate that Christina Rossetti’s verses in “Uphill” are under scrutiny for their didactic effects as well as for their mediæval technique.  Four years later, poetic technique begins to gain more importance to the critics, as is illustrated by the criticism of Dante Rossetti’s “Jenny.” 
	The version which we have of “Jenny” is much expanded and altered, both structurally and conceptually, from an early version, about 1847, now lost.  It was re-written during 1858 and 1859, and was again revised for publication in Rossetti’s 1870 Poems (Lang 500).  Not very much was said in the press about the poem, perhaps because the subject matter would still be considered mildly scandalous today:  an engaged young man visits a prostitute, who falls asleep in his lap before any amorous advances can occur.  He favorably compares the prostitute Jenny to his fiancée Nell, and leaves his gold coins scattered in her hair before he leaves, nothing more accomplished than a night of musing.  The scandal, of course, is less the fact that the narrator is visiting a prostitute than the comparison of the profane lover and the sacred.  Lise Rodgers explains the contemporary reactions to “Jenny” as centered on the didactic elements of the story.  What does “Jenny” have to teach its readers?
Thomas G. Hake, for instance—Rossetti’s contemporary—defines it as a “race” between “immortal and mortal reflections,” with the immortal persisting and eventually winning. . . . (Rodgers 22)
However, Rodgers is also careful to point to other instances wherein Hake discusses the paired symbols in the poem—the book of rationality and the flower of sensuality—a discussion of technical elements.  The criticism of “Jenny,” then, can be seen as bridging the gap between the visible and the visual.  Indeed, the only thing that the Old and New critic had to say in June 1870 about the poem was that it contained “realistic touches of the most earthly sort” (“Dante Gabriel Rossetti” 92), a comment which may be interpreted on the level either of technique or message.  
	Algernon Swinburne comments on “Jenny” as one of the most perfect of Rossetti’s poems in “The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti” in the June 1870 issue of The Fortnightly Review: “The clock ticking, the bird waking, the scratched pier-glass, the shaded lamp, give new relief as of very light and present sound to the spiritual side of the poem” (571).  Swinburne cites a passage from the poem: 
Except when there may rise unsought
Haply at times a passing thought
Of the old days, which seem to be
Much older than any history
That is written in any book;
When she would lie in fields and look
Along the ground through the blown grass
And wonder where the city was,
Far out of sight, whose broil and bale
They told her for a child’s fairy tale.  (Poetical Works 73)
Swinburne’s comment on this passage illustrates the emerging critical emphasis on technical matters:  “The simple sudden sound of that plain line is as great and rare a thing in the way of verse . . . as any man’s work can show” (571).  By the time William Morris’ “The Day is Coming” is published fourteen years later, the critical public centers its discussion squarely on the technical elements of this overtly didactic poem. 
William Morris’ poetry is an especially good example to use in this discussion of the critical shift from social message to technique because of the meta-artistic quality of Morris’ writing. Morris became very interested in Socialism toward the end of the century, and brought out many long pieces of doggerel verse intended to be sung at workers’ meetings (Stevenson 175).  He was engaged in writing lectures “on the social function of art and speeches on radical politics” (Stevenson 177).  In 1885, the year after “The Day is Coming” was composed, Morris helped to found the Socialist League, and became editor of its organ The Commonweal.  “The Day is Coming,” a short poem which appeared in Morris’ pamphlet Chants for Socialists in 1884, espouses jingoistic patriotism and the rise of the downtrodden proletariat (Literature of England 806).  A short passage from the poem shows its simple meter and overtly didactic tone: 
It is we who must answer and hasten, and open wide the door
For the rich man’s hurrying terror, and the slow-foot hope of the poor.  (43-44)
Such a social-reform-minded poem, it seems, might best be criticized for its radical social message.  The critics, however, chose to dissect Morris’ simple meter, image patterns, and obvious rhyme scheme (Stevenson 178)—hallmarks of the shift toward technique.  The Quarterly Review notes in January 1872 that “the natural languor of Mr. Morris’s style makes his verse at once diffuse and tedious.  An incurable habit of gossipping causes him to loiter in his narratives, when he should be swift and stirring” (“The Latest” 79).  This tendency to critique the praxis of a poem characterizes late-nineteenth-century critical discourse, and may also be seen in criticism of Algernon Swinburne’s “The Commonweal.”
	Two years after Morris’ publication of Chants for Socialists, Swinburne came out with his own paean to the proletariat:  “The Commonweal:  A Song for Unionists.”  Both Swinburne and Morris are better known for their mediævalistic works—Morris for his transliterations of the Niebelungenlied and Swinburne for Atalanta in Calydon, discussed below.  The critical press paid little attention to Swinburne’s social reform projects; when it did deign to review Swinburne’s later didactic works, it did so by focusing on the praxis of poems like “The Commonweal.”  The Quarterly Review notices Swinburne’s new Socialist bent, but spends much of a January 1872 article in pursuit of faulty meter and obfuscating diction: 
Every work of Mr. Swinburne’s is a succession of daring explorations in metre, and this [“The Commonweal”] is no exception.  Yet neither the language . . . nor the versification . . . is a true reflection of the action or passions of the men among whom they live.  To alter the accentuation of words in common use, to speak of “rich enow” instead of “rich enough,” to call a merchant “a dromond”:  these are [glaring] examples of “poetic diction.” (“The Latest Developments of Literary Poetry” 83)
Just as didactic verses like “The Commonweal” are criticized for their technical content and archaic style by the end of the century, the same kind of shift can be seen when we look at some Pre-Raphaelite poems which are primarily nostalgic or mediæval in tone.

Nostalgic Poetry

Many of the poems produced by the Pre-Raphaelites also draw upon nostalgia, mediæval themes, and archaic poetic diction for their effect, and might be termed “decorative” in their reliance on heady hyper-detailed descriptions.  A number of Dante Rossetti’s poems, for instance, rely upon a roundel stanza pattern common in fourteenth-century France (D. Rossetti Poetic Works xxiii).  Four poems may illustrate the nostalgic aspect of Pre-Raphaelite poetry: William Morris’ “The Defense of Guenevere” (1858), Algernon Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Christina Rossetti’s “A Royal Princess” (1851-1866), and Dante Rossetti’s “Sister Helen” (1870).
Contemporary critics, in discussing these poems, focus primarily on the didactic messages in “The Defense of Guenevere,” turning to the technical aspects only with the later poems—“A Royal Princess,” Atalanta in Calydon, and “Sister Helen.”  What is most surprising about this critical trend is that the early poem “The Defense of Guenevere” so obviously deals with a nostalgic mediæval theme, while Atalanta in Calydon is based in Greek mythos, yet the critics follow the expected pattern, shifting from criticism of message to criticism of praxis as the century goes along.
	William Morris’ poem “The Defense of Guenevere” is an example of early Pre-Raphaelite poetry receiving critical attention for its didactic content.  The poem is obviously mediæval, hearkening back to an idealized time of chivalry, yet contemporary critics saw it as “an implicit statement on the tangled relationship between the artist and his audience, Art and Society” (Sternberg 45).  Ellen Sternberg goes further, saying that we assume that 
both the narrator and the reader clearly approve of Guenevere, in spite of the fact that the domestic values most revered by the conventional Victorian audience—chastity, deity, responsibility, sanctity of home and family—are all defeated in the poem. (51)
Sternberg’s argument is an echo of what the Athenæum critic termed “The Defense of Guenevere” on 3 April 1858: 
Disposed, as we are, to recognize all who cultivate poetry honestly, whatever the style—and admitting that Mr.  Morris may be counted among that choir—we must call attention to his book of Pre-Raphaelite minstrelsy as a curiosity which shows how far affectation may mislead an earnest man towards the fog-land of Art. . . .  We shall once more be invited to accept, wrapped round with some delicate roseleaf of sophistry, or locked up in some casket of curious device the fallacy that—Naught is everything, and everything is naught.—What matter? Truth is the same, poetry undying from all time and in all ages; but masquing is not truth and the galvanism of old legend is not poetry.  (145)
This passage contains three essential phrases which explain why the Athenæum critic speaks in terms of the message and not of the tone.  First, there is the critic’s use of the term “Pre-Raphaelite” itself:  in 1858, “Pre-Raphaelite” was still primarily a way to describe painting, which had yet to receive societal approval as a meaning-conveying medium.  In describing Morris’ poetry as Pre-Raphaelite in nature, the writer hints that there is no deeper meaning at all in Morris’ verses—an attack on conceptual, not technical grounds.  Second, the phrase “delicate roseleaf of sophistry” addresses the message of the poetry:  this flowery  language (no pun intended) asserts that Morris’ poem is an early example of ars gratia artis, art for art’s sake.  Again, it is a criticism of the concepts involved in, or lacking from, “The Defence of Guenevere.”  Last, the contrast of Truth and “masquing” draws Morris’ poetry as decorative, as opposed to didactic.  This, too, deals with the poem under the assumption that the written word is rightly a vehicle for a didactic message.  
	Peter Faulkner cites the Literary Gazette’s description of “The Defence of Guenevere” as containing “loving elaboration of every minute detail” (35), and the Tablet’s states that “the conscious rendering of the actual, in its minutest details, is observed . . . in the description of gestures, attitudes, features, and garments” (qtd. in Keane 75).  Both of these short excerpts are problematic, in that they focus on technical data within the poem, but they are easily explained by Robert Keane’s observation that “Morris’ was the first book of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, and reviewers tended to equate the poems with painting” (75).  These reviewers from the Literary Gazette and the Tablet, then, were correct in discussing the technical merits of what were, to them, word paintings.  The critical shift from didacticism to technique is not weakened, but rather strengthened, by these two seemingly incongruous examples.  Seven years later, Algernon Swinburne’s epic poem Atalanta in Calydon contains all of the elements of nostalgia for an idealized classical Greece, yet the criticism it receives is a blend of discussions of his technique and didactic intent.   
The first two sentences which J. Leicester Warren writes in his Fortnightly Review discussion of Atalanta in Calydon in 1865 show the flux in which literary criticism found itself:  
Another drama of Periclean Athens in the dialect of the Thames.  Mr. Swinburne will again sing for us in these latter days the old-world story of how the whole country of Ætolia turned out, after due libations and much martial oratory, to conquer one overgrown wood-pig, and how severely the press of heroes suffered in the engagement.  (75)
The first part of this selection deals with the poetic technique—a comment on Swinburne’s affected choice of diction for the Greek characters in his poem.  The second sentence is more a discussion of the social significance—actually, the lack of social significance—of the poem to the Victorian reading public.  Warren’s review exhibits both elements because of its place in the chronology I have proposed; 1865 is close to the middle of the second half of the nineteenth century.  To further illustrate the mixed tone of Warren’s review, I cite his recommendations to the reading public, which also contain both critical elements: 
Mr. Swinburne is too much given to comparing everything with “flames” and “flowers,” and again, “flames” with “hair. . . .”  Atalanta deserves to be read by everyone who takes an interest in contemporaneous poetry.  The blemishes are few, and the beauties are many. . . .  Even from this early effort Mr. Swinburne may claim a place among contemporaneous minor poets. . . .  (80)
Here also we can see the use of technical criticism followed by an allusion to the beneficial effects on the reading public.  Whether the laudatory tone of Warren’s review is due to the fact that Swinburne was also a critic for the Fortnightly Review at the time, Warren’s article represents the beginning of the critical shift toward criticism of the stilted nostalgic technique in Pre-Raphaelite poetry.  In the time between Warren’s review of Atalanta in Calydon and the publication of Christina Rossetti’s poem “A Royal Princess” in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, we can see the shift begin to strengthen. 
	Although it was written in 1851, “A Royal Princess” was not published until 1866, when the critical press in England was in flux—some critics clung to the old ways, criticizing her poems for their didactic content (or lack of it), while some of the “newer” critics chose to look instead at the poetess’ meter, rhyme scheme and diction.  An example of the “old” criticism comes from The Critic, an American magazine published in New York, one step removed from the British artistic scene.  By 24 September 1881, when this review was published, The Critic shows its outdated style by focusing on the effect produced by “A Royal Princess”: it “is far from being the best [work she has done].  It is juvenile in tone, not particularly fresh in treatment, not rich in material” (257).
	In the same review, however, there is a bit of technical criticism, as well:  “Miss Rossetti excels in these bits, but rhyme is a trouble to her, and, as often happens, she makes her labor all the more in her determination to have it. . . .  The verse is often strained and the sense mangled” (257).  This duality of tone denotes the mid-way point in the shift from criticism of the message to criticism of technique.  The shift is complete by 1895, when The Critic publishes a retrospective review of Christina Rossetti’s poetic career in comparison to those of her brother Dante and of Algernon Swinburne.  
	Indeed, it is difficult for the 12 January 1895 Critic to speak of else but the technical aspects of the Rossettis’ poetry: 
Both [Christina and Dante Rossetti] think in sensuous, concrete images, but do not often subject them to any principles of harmony. . . .  There is a heaping-up of far-fetched images, metrical curiosities, worn-out symbols, archaic expressions, the more opposed to one another, the more welcome.  We have . . . crocodiles with fangs of gold, and “blue-black beetles” that “transact business” which, perhaps, were better described than left to be imagined.  (“Christina Georgina Rossetti” 4) 
This critical concern for the technical elements of poetry is well entrenched by the time Christina’s brother Dante publishes Poems in 1870, in which “Sister Helen” appears.  
	By 1870, Algernon Swinburne had become one of the regular critical contributors to the Fortnightly Review, and he made good use of this forum to praise his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the June 1870 issue.  Even Swinburne—one of the Pre-Raphaelite poets himself—was not excepted from the critical gravitation toward technique.  His review of Rossetti’s ballad “Sister Helen” appears in his article “The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti”—from which I have also used Swinburne’s comments on “Jenny.”  Swinburne focuses on the technical elements of Rossetti’s poem: 
There can be no pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothing that flags, nothing that overflows; there must be no waste of a word or a minute in the course of its rapid and fiery motion.  Even in our affluent ballad literature there is no more triumphant sample of the greatness that may be won by a poem on these conditions than “Sister Helen.” (506)
After this short section which sets up Swinburne’s criteria for judging the poem, he comments on the poem itself.  Note the focus on technique: 
The tragic music of its measure, the swift yet solemn harmonies of dialogue and burden, hold in extract the very heart of a tragedy, the burning essence distilled from “Hate born of Love, and blind as he.” [line 15]. . .  A girl forsaken by her high-born lover turns to sorcery for help in her revenge on him.  (506)
In the interest of space, I have cut much of Swinburne’s extensive plot summary, yet that, too, can be seen as emphasis on detail and technique, because of its complexity and fidelity to even the small events in “Sister Helen” (507).  In fact, Swinburne credits “Sister Helen” as one of Rossetti’s best poems, along with “Eden Bower” and “Jenny” (507).  If even the Pre-Raphaelites themselves showed the signs of the shift in focus from didactic message to technical achievement in their own critical writing, we should expect that a general survey of the trends in critical reaction to Pre-Raphaelite poetry would reveal the same pattern, and indeed, it does.

Conclusion

The criticism of Pre-Raphaelite poetry undergoes an ideological shift between 1849 and 1900, beginning with concern about the didactic content of early works which gradually becomes appraisal of the archaic, nostalgic, technical elements of later works.  This process illustrates how the weight given to the written word as a didactic tool is gradually de-emphasized in favor of pure aesthetic appreciation as the nineteenth century progressed.
The didactic element of Pre-Raphaelite poetry is seen in early reviews.  Later critics phase out their discussions of the social agenda of Pre-Raphaelite poetry in favor of speaking to the technical merits or deficiencies in the works, but the criticism of the early poems is very consistent in its focus on social effects.  For instance, David Masson’s review of The Germ, which appeared in the British Quarterly Review for 1 August 1852, notes with scorn that 
the thoughts of such passages as these [previous], it will be perceived, is as juvenile and immature as the writing. . . .  As might be expected, Pre-Raphaelitism expresses itself better on canvas than on paper. (Masson 212)  
It is ironic to note that Masson, one of the few critics who associates early Pre-Raphaelite painting with didacticism speaks about Pre-Raphaelite painting better fulfilling the duties which their poetry ought to.  Another review of The Germ, this one from the general notices of new books in the Art Journal for March 1850, says that “there is so much of true thinking and right feeling in the various articles in this little journal; and we wish so well to its projectors that we will gladly doff the critic[’s hat], cheering them on their path” (96).  It helps to have friends in high places:  Frederic George Stephens, one of the original seven Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, was a critic for the Art Journal, hence the glowing praise.  Even the Pre-Raphaelites themselves, to an extent, when they turned a meta-critical eye upon themselves, used the concepts of didactic content, as Stephens’ review and Swinburne’s criticism of Rossetti, above, illustrate. 
Another example of this early critical attitude comes from Charles Dickens, who attacked the newly-formed P.R.B. in the 15 June 1850 Household Words.  “Old Lamps for New Ones” is a typically Dickensian set of hypothetical “what-ifs,” meant to imply the silliness of the situation under his satirical scrutiny.  Dickens spends much of the article ridiculing the painting techniques of the P.R.B., and then turns to the supposed social effects of P.R.B. poetry, presumably from The Germ: 
In literature, a very spirited effort has been made, which is no less than the formation of a P. G. A. P. C. B., or Pre-Gower and Pre-Chaucer-Brotherhood, for the restoration of the ancient English style of spelling, and the weeding out from all libraries, public and private, of those and all later pretenders, particularly a person of loose character named Shakespeare.  It having been suggested, however, that this happy idea could scarcely be considered complete while the art of printing remained unmolested, another society, under the name of the Pre-Laurentius Brotherhood, has been established in connexion with it, for the abolition of all but manuscript books.  (267)
From this it can be conjectured that Dickens’ treatment of Pre-Raphaelite literary output deals with the didactic consequences of the formation of his fictitious P.G.A.P.C.B. and P.L.S. 
	In 1866, Swinburne published Poems and Ballads, which met with mixed reviews.  A Saturday Review article which is reproduced in the November 1866 issue of the Eclectic Magazine compares the previous year’s Atalanta in Calydon to the new volume of poems: 
It was too rashly said, when Atalanta in Calydon appeared, that Mr. Swinburne had drunk deep at the springs of Greek poetry, and had profoundly conceived and assimilated the divine spirit of Greek art. . . .  [T]his new volume shows with great plainness how far removed Mr. Swinburne’s tone of mind is from that of the Greek poets.  (558)
Thus far, the review sounds like an early one, using words such as “tone” and “spirit”—words which denote the discourse of social didacticism.  However, the review shifts in the next paragraph to a discussion of technical, visual details: 
He is like a composer who should fill his orchestra with trumpets, or a painter who should exclude every color but a blaring red, and a green as of sour fruit.  There are not twenty stanzas in the whole book which have the faintest tincture of soberness.  We are in the midst of fire and serpents, wine and ashes, blood and foam, and a hundred lurid horrors.  (558)
This second part sounds more like a discussion of archaic technique:  lists of details, concrete images and metaphors used to describe the particulars of Swinburne’s collection.  1866 is near the mid-point in the critical shift from examining the didactic message to examining technical merit, so the Saturday Review’s discussion of both elements of Swinburne’s poetry is not surprising.  This expected criticism-in-flux leads to later criticism of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, which also follows the expected pattern:  it discusses solely the technical elements of the poetry in question. 
	Criticism of later works done by the Pre-Raphaelites centers on the technicalities of language, structure, and idiom.  William Morris recognized the shift in critical attitudes when he wrote in 1880 that the 
time was when the poetry resulting merely from the intense study and love of literature might have been, if not the best, yet at any rate very worthy and enduring.   (Mackail 74-5)
Swinburne, about whom this passage is written, had been criticized rather harshly in the 1861 Spectator, whose critic denounced his language as “painfully distorted, vague, elliptical, and bristling with harsh words” (42).  The Athenæum critic had equally caustic words for Swinburne on 4 May 1861:  “We should have conceived it hardly possible to make the crimes of Catherine de Medici dull, however they were presented.  Mr. Swinburne, however, has done so” (595).
	Turning from Swinburne to Christina Rossetti, we find that her poetry was given to a “more delicate” critic, C[aroline]. E. Norton, at MacMillan’s in 1863. She follows the trend toward technical criticism by quoting at length from both the Coventry Patmore poem and “Goblin Market” (399 ff.) Norton looks only at the surface story line of “Goblin Market”: “One thing is certain; we ought not to buy fruit from goblin men. . . . Decidedly not all the list of delicious fruits with which the volume opens shall make us waver in our resolution” (402).  Norton’s emphasis on the “list of delicious fruits” shows that she is speaking about Christina Rossetti’s poem in light of its technical details.  This late focus on nostalgia and technique also appears in a critical work by T. S. Eliot. 
	Eliot comments on Swinburne’s poetry in his 1890 The Sacred Wood, and his words recall the opposed poles of the critical continuum from 1850 to 1900—the copy, which stands for an object, and the simulacrum, which replaces the object entirely: 
When you take to pieces any verse of Swinburne, you always find that the object was not there—only the word.  The poetry is not morbid, it is not erotic, it is not destructive.  These are adjectives which can be applied to the materials, to the human feelings, which in Swinburne’s case do not exist.  The morbidity is not of human feeling but of language. . . .  The object has ceased to exist, because the meaning is only a hallucination of meaning.  (135-6)
All of these comments on later work share a technical-criticism tone.  Each speaks of the merit or deficiency in Swinburne’s writing, and each critic omits discussion of Swinburne’s intent or socio-didactic effects.  Eliot even goes so far as to suggest that intent—didacticism itself—is no longer important; it is the simulacrum—the “hallucination of meaning”—which is by the end of the century the most important aspect of poetry.

Works Cited
“Christina Georgina Rossetti.”  Rev. in The Critic 14.2 (12 Jan. 1895):  4.
“Dante Gabriel Rossetti.”  Rev. of Poems by D. G. Rossetti.  Old and New 2 (Jul. 1870):  92-94.
Dickens, Charles.  “Old Lamps for New Ones.”  Household Words 1.12 (15 Jun. 1850):  12-4.
Eliot, T. S.  The Sacred Wood.  London, 1890.
Faulkner, Peter.  William Morris:  The Critical Heritage.  London:  Routledge, 1973.
The Germ:  Thoughts Toward Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art; Being a Facsimile Reprint of the Literary Organ of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Published in 1850.  Introd.  William Michael Rossetti.  London, 1901; Rpt. in The Germ:  A Pre-Raphaelite Little Magazine.  Ed.  Robert Stahr Hosmon.  Coral Gables, FL:  U of Miami P, 1970.
Henderson, Marina.  Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  New York:  St. Martin’s, 1973.
Hunt, William Holman.  Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  London:  MacMillan, 1905.  2 vols.
Keane, Robert N.  “Ut Pictura Poesis:  Rossetti and Morris:  Paintings into Poetry.”  The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 7.2 (1987):  75-9.
Lang, Cecil Y.  The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
“The Latest Development of Literary Poetry.”  Rev. of Songs Before Sunrise by A. C. Swinburne, Poems by D. G. Rossetti, and The Earthly Paradise by W. Morris.  The Quarterly Review 132 (Jan. 1872):  59-84.
The Literature of England, an Anthology and a History:  From the Dawn of the Romantic Movement to the Present Day.  Eds. George Anderson, Homer Watt, and George Woods.  3rd ed.  2 volumes.  New York:  Scott, 1948.  Vol. 2.
Mackail, J. W.  The Life of William Morris.  London, 1899.  
Masson, David.  “Pre-Raphaelitism in Art and Literature.”  Includes revs. of Discourses on the Fine Arts, The Germ, Pre-Raphaelitism, and Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Royal Academy.  The British Quarterly Review 14 (1 Aug. 1852):  197-220.
“Miss Rossetti’s Poems.”  Rev. of The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti.  Saturday Review.  Rpt. in Eclectic Magazine 4.3 (Sep. 1866):  322-5.
“Mr. Swinburne’s New Poems.”  Rev of Poems and Ballads by Algernon Charles Swinburne.  Saturday Review.  Rpt. in Eclectic Magazine 4.5 (Nov. 1866):  556-60. 
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