A poem for every day

Wealth and originality of images, rhythmic innovation in a combination with modest architectonics of a poem, skillful alternation of harmony and a dissonance and naturalness of poetic language are typical for the Rossetti’s poetry.

Born: 5 December 1830
London, England
Who is Christina Rossetti: English poet, sister of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Christina Georgina Rossetti biography

Christina Georgina Rossetti was the English poetess, the sister of the painter and the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Their father, Gabriel Rossetti, the Italian literary critic, a poet- romantic and scientist, emigrated to London in the 1824, their mother was Francis Polydori. Besides Dante Gabriel, Christina had two more kids in the family: Maria and William, they both became writers.

Christina Rossetti received home education, mainly the mother was engaged in her training. Works of Italian classics – Dante Alighieri and Petrarch – had great influence on the future poetess.

Already in the teens, Christina Rossetti suffered from nervous breakdowns and a depression. In that period, she began to be seriously interested in doctrines of the church of England, which would exert great influence on her further creativity.

Christina Rossetti marriage

In the youth, Christina Rossetti was plighted with the artist James Collins. But the engagement was torn in the year 1850, when Collins accepted Catholicism. Later Christina had one more love affair, it was with the linguist Charles Kiley but again the marriage did not take place and again for religious reasons. The artist John Brett became the third claimant to the poetess’s hand, but he was also denied.

On the 29th of December, 1894, she died from cancer and was buried in the known London cemetery Highgate.

Creative work of Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti began to write poems from the 1842, most often imitating her favorite poets – Keats and Scott.

Since the 1847, she began to experiment with different versifications: anthems, ballads and sonnets. Following the traditions of romanticism, her first verses often touched on themes of the death of a beloved person or his loss.

The most famous collection of poems of Christina Rossetti is “Goblin Market and Other Poems”. Her brother created illustrations for this collection. The collection was edited in the 1862. It received approval of the critics, who announced Rossetti the most significant woman – a poetess of their time.

In the beginning of the XXth century, in a regard to development of modernism, the poetry of Christina Rossetti turned forgotten, and she was again discovered already in the 1970s. The modern English criticism allocates to her a noticeable place among poets of the Victorian era.

Poems of Christina Rossetti

The poems of Christina Rossetti are resonant and melodious. They are often sad and tragic. The wealth of the content of her poems stuns. Some themes of the Rossetti’s lyric are: the plainness of sensual pleasures, the power of love and its shortcoming, the existence as ascension to spiritual heights, the end of life as a deserved quiet; the transfiguration and the reunion with the Eternal.

The poem of Christina Rossetti “Goblin market” (1862) became her hallmark. This work strongly frightened the Victorian society. It was forbidden to read it to the young girls and it was even considered promiscuous, as the interpretation, to which the Victorian ladies and the gentlemen subjected it, characterized the society itself.

The poetry of Rossetti is also distinguished by great religiosity and idolatry to the beauty of nature, for example, her the poem of Christina Rossetti “Uphill” (1887). It is also about her aspiration to spiritual heights.

Popular poems by Christina Rossetti

1. A Birthday
2. Remember
3. When I am dead, my dearest
4. Who Has Seen the Wind?
5. In An Artist’s Studio
6. A Daughter Of Eve
7. Uphill
8. What Would I Give
9. Winter: My Secret
10. Cousin Kate

How did Christina Rossetti die?

While the poet was diagnosed with Graves’ Disease and went through an attack that nearly killed her at the beginning of the 1970s, it wasn’t eventually the cause of her death. In 1893, Rossetti found out she had breast cancer. A mastectomy didn’t help much, and only a year later cancer recurred. Rossetti died on 29 December 1894.

Christina Rossetti death: 29 December 1894 in London, England