In my last blog post I considered why ‘revival’ isn’t the best word for discussing Romanticism as it existed in the Victorian period. Here I’m going to take a slightly different angle. At first it may appear contradictory, but the first generation Pre-Raphaelites and their circle considered themselves to have ‘discovered’, ‘found’, and ‘reclaimed’ the Romantics William Blake and John Keats for a new generation of Victorians. For the Pre-Raphaelites it wasn’t just a case of renovating Blake’s and Keats’s reputations and images, but of further adapting and appropriating their poetic and visual work, adopting their creative methods in the process. The opening two thirds of the post therefore uses these terms within a contextual understanding of their application. The final part of the post looks beyond the Pre-Raphaelites to consider how Blake’s and Keats’s legacies were handled by other Victorians.

William Blake

Integral to Blake’s revival was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his brother, William Michael Rossetti, and Alexander Gilchrist. In 1847 Dante bought the Notebook of William Blake from Samuel Palmer which contained a multitude of poems and prose fragments by Blake. With William, he also played a significant role in supplying material from the Notebook for the controversial second volume of Gilchrist’s biography The Life of William Blake (1863). After Alexander’s death in 1861, the two brothers worked hard to complete and publish the biography, adding introductions and essays. They also produced the second volume, including Dante’s heavily edited versions of Blake’s work (at time rewriting Blake) as he had a “desire to make Blake more readable for the Victorian public” (Whittaker 2010b). Dante’s actions, although criticised by his contemporaries and hardly condonable by editorial standards today, was not out of keeping with anthologies of the time as they often altered or truncated Romantic texts to fit Victorian sensibilities.

As Jason Whittaker has rightly noted, the publication of the biography was instrumental in “renovating” Blake’s reputation from obscurity in the second half of the nineteenth century and making more readers aware of the Romantic (2010a). Although sparking a war of authenticity (see below), It also inspired subsequent works by Pre-Raphaelite like Algernon Charles Swinburne (William Blake, A Critical Essay, 1868) and William Michael Rossetti (The Poetical Works of William Blake, Lyrical and Miscellaneous, 1874), indicating the group’s investment in maintaining a hold on Blake’s legacy, albeit crafting the illusion that Blake’s work was only “accessible to an aesthetic elite” (Whittaker 2010b).

Blake quickly became a mentor of sorts. His dual persona as a poet-artist offered a refreshing model for the Pre-Raphaelites, who experimented with it while testing the new dimensions of their aesthetics and art theory. This resulted in works such as Dante’s book cover designs and illustrations (see figure 1) and the productions of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. The marriage of image and word not only enhanced the manuscript as an object of art, the choice of image and calligraphy also helped Morris mimic and reimagine the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

Figure 1 – The Sonnet (1880)

The Pre-Raphaelites also adopted Blake’s use of “old songs and nursery verses for lyric and ironical purposes” from shared sources such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of English Poetry (1765) (Helsinger 2019: 217). Considering the group’s fascination with Medievalism as an aesthetic, the adoption of older poetic forms made sense, and Blake and Percy offered the frameworks they could harness.

Blake’s “constant unison of wonder and familiarity so mysteriously allied in nature” further influenced and harmonised with the artistic values of Pre-Raphaelitism (Rossetti in Gilchrist 1863: 416). Blake’s mysticism spoke directly to the Victorian’s fascination with the unseen world: John Henry Newman, Francis Thompson among others cranked what they perceived as the Blake’s and the Romantic’s mystic beliefs up to ten in their Catholic poetry and prose.

Finally, Marcia Werner’s research indicates that the group drew on Blake’s structures and frames in their art. Specifically, Werner places William Holman Hunt’s The Lady of Shalott (1850, figure 2) as a direct descendent of the twenty-second plate of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, Job and His Daughters (1826, figure 3), illustrating the pervasive influence Blake had on the Pre-Raphaelites (2005: 238-9).

John Keats

The influence Blake exhibited over the Pre-Raphaelites is all but eclipsed by the behemoth shadow cast by Keats. Keats is generally perceived as the “germ” and “embryo” of Pre-Raphaelitism (Praz 1956: 202; quoted in Colvin 1917: 470). It was in his poetry and pictorial writing that the Pre-Raphaelites found the inspiration and source material for their many, many adaptations and appropriations of Keats’s work.

They admired his “pictorial brilliance” and intense sensuality through his employment of the framed Spenserian stanza and ekphrastic attention to frozen and static imagery as can be read in the opening stanza of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (Colvin 1909: 165):

St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

Additionally, his Gothic, “astonishingly real medievalism for one not bred as an artist” spoke to the Medieval aesthetic the Pre-Raphaelites wished to employ in their art (Rossetti 1919: 9). Their intense focus on poems such as ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’, and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, and their repetitive adaptions consequently canonised the poems not only as some of Keats’s best works, but also windows into the Medieval past for their Victorian contemporaries. This process reinforced to the Victorians that Keats was “an apparent escapist from the political and social world into an aestheticized past” (Goslee 2017: 133).

However, the Pre-Raphaelites also appropriate Keats’s Medieval work. While they were instrumental in bringing Keats’s Medievalism into conversation with the social, political, and erotic tensions prevalent in Victorian society (Goslee 2017: 133 and Werner 2005: 124), they also commodified the sexuality of his poetry into “profitable art […] sustainable stimulation” for late Victorian voyeuristic audiences (Wootton 2006: 70). Sex sold. And the Pre-Raphaelites used Keats to sell it.

Wider ‘Webs of Reception’

The Pre-Raphaelite’s intense focus on Blake and Keats helped to transform the Romantic poets, giving them new relevance to the Victorians. However, their afterlives did not solely rest on the Pre-Raphaelite’s shoulders, other Victorians were invested in the development of the Romantic poet’s legacies. As I noted last time, biographies, anthologies, and edited collections proved key avenues for Victorians to change the story about the Romantics according to the author’s or editor’s personal bias and ideological stance. These played a key part in the Victorian’s (re)visions of Blake and Keats.

Up until the 1860s Blake was a figure of relative obscurity. It’s surprising to us now that this may have been the case; Blake’s poem ‘London’ is on the English GCSE national curriculum (still my favourite poem to teach) and Jerusalem is sung at Rugby matches, in churches, and at three o’clock in the morning on the way home from a night out (this happens, believe me). However, even as late as the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-1911), “the canon of Romantic poets in 1911 was loose, mutable, and large, and Blake was not in it” (Faber 2023)! Blake was known… he just wasn’t a ‘Romantic’.

Returning to the 1860s, H.J. Jackson reminds us that the reason for Blake’s obscurity was because after he passed, there were no reprints of his poems (2015: 172). Gilchrist’s biography and the Rossetti’s heavy handed approach to Blake’s words, however, sparked a war. Suddenly writers, editors, and biographers shot out of the woodwork to challenge Dante’s ‘authentic’ Blake. One example is Basil Montagu Pickering who reproduced the 1839 Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1866, the introduction of which directly named Dante and attacked his work in the second volume of Gilchrist’s biography. The war to replicate Blake’s integral, authentic, genuine verse and fill the gap left by Dante’s unfaithfulness was on. Blake was the talk of the town, although questions over dates and accuracy continued to dominate discussion throughout the Victorian period.

Unfortunately, Keats didn’t have it any easier. Initially sparked by the rumour that reviews had led to his early death, Keats’s masculinity and maturity were consistently questioned by the Victorians. Biographers and critics swayed from delighting in his poetry of 1819 to criticising his poems in general for being “oversensitive, self-indulgent, and luxurious” (Jackson 2015: 126). Towards the end of the century, the tension started to ease. Sidney Colvin’s biography Keats (1887) in the ‘English Men of Letters’ series turned the tide as it noted that whether Keats had achieved greatness in every poem or not, he was one of the most discussed and critiqued poets of the time. Also, Matthew Arnold and Swinburne both ranked Keats as one of the greatest English poets, constructing the vision of Keats as the leader of the Romantic movement (Jackson 2015: 128).

Tying Loose Ends

To close I’d just like to reiterate that although the Pre-Raphaelites saw themselves as ‘reviving’ the Romantics, the picture is not so black and white. Blake’s legacy had not fully died, nor had Keats disappeared completely. Their work still existed, if in limited forms, and the living memory of their friends and acquaintances meant they had not completely vanished. The late Victorian arguments and debates over what was the correct version of a Blake poem or whether Keats was worthy of their respect ultimately shows just how complex Victorian receptions of Romanticism were; tangled in ideologies of religion, gender, aesthetics, the picture was never clear cut.

Bibliography

Colvin. Sidney. 1909. Keats. (London: Macmillan and Co.).

— 1917. John Keats; his life and poetry, his friends, critics and after-fame (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons).

Faber, Michael. 2023. William Blake: Then & Now: Romantic-Era Poets in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Available at: https://eb11.uvic.ca/blake_william.html

Gilchrist, Alexander. 1863. Life of William Blake, “Pictor ignotus”: with selections from his poems and other writings. Volume I (London: Macmillan and Co.).

Goslee, Nancy Moore. 2017. ‘The Visual and Plastic Arts’ in John Keats in Context, ed. by Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 126-135.

Helsinger, Elizabeth. 2019. ‘Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes’ in William Blake in Context, ed. by Sarah Haggarty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 211-218.

Jackson, H.J. 2015. Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame (Yale: Yale University Press).

Praz, Mario. 1956. The Romantic Agony trans. by Angus Davidson (New York: Meridian Books).

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. 1919. John Keats: Criticism and Comment (London: Privately published by H.B. Foreman).

Werner, Marcia. 2005. Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Nineteenth-Century Realism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Whittaker, Jason. 2010a. William Morris and the Art of the Book. Available at: https://zoamorphosis.com/william-morris-and-the-art-of-the-book/

— 2010b. Blake’s art and Dante Rossetti. Available at: https://zoamorphosis.com/blakes-art-and-dante-rossetti/

Wootton, Sarah. 2006. Consuming Keats: Nineteenth Century Representations in Art and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).