Selected Poems (Fyfield Books)

by Christina Rossetti (Author), Christina Rossetti (Author), C. H. Sisson (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1984

  $3.25

  Christina Rossetti was in a sense the first poet of the Pre-Raphelites, her Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) having been - as if by accident - the writing from that group which first caught public attention. It contains many of her best poems. Later work - devotional poems, love lyrics and descriptive pieces - extended the themes and forms of her first remarkable collection. It is remarkable, but in a quiet and intense way, not in the manner of those who seem to have learned from her among her contemporaries. Ford Madox Ford, who had a subtle ear for the unemphatic excellence of the 19th-century writers, called her the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced . Her modern admirers are many, especially among the poets. Philip Larkin speaks of her poetry as unequalled for its objective expression of happiness denied and a certain unfamiliar steely stoicism . In this selection C.H. Sisson presents a wide range of her work and in his biographical and critical introduction suggests fresh perspectives on it. Sisson also includes here Rossetti's long-unavailable Maude, A Story for Girls , which was written when she was very young and gives some indication of her cast of mind and her skills as a writer of prose fiction. The character of Maude is a severe self-portrait, wry at her own expense. As Sisson says, with any poet the starting point, social as well as literary, is worth finding out about .