To read Christina Rossetti is to enter a world of exquisite tension, a realm where the sacred and the sensual wage a quiet but ferocious war. She is the poet of renunciation who wrote some of the most sensuous verse in the English language, the devout Anglo-Catholic who filled her pages with goblin fruits that drip with irresistible juice, and the reclusive Victorian spinster whose inner life was a tumultuous landsca…
“I am looking through Aunt C.'s journals, and have found a small — very small — proportion of sentences to preserve: amongst these some which it would have been a pity to destroy.”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, England, the eldest of twelve children to Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke. Her arrival marked the first in her family born in England in over two centuries, as the Barrett fortune stemmed from vast sugar plantations in Jamaica. The family soon moved to Hope End, a sprawling estate near Ledbury in Herefordshire…
“I never wrote a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took me at the right moment!”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness
