Christina Georgina Rossetti Her Life and Literary Activity

Christina Georgina Rossetti Her Life and Literary Activities

Her Life and Literary Activities :[Christina Georgina Rossetti]

Christina Rossetti definitely occupies a distinctive place in Victorian poetry. She was not, like her famous brother D.G. Rossetti, an English person in birth and blood. Of course, she was born in London on December 5, 1830. She was the youngest of her parents’ four children.

Her father was an Italian who had to leave his country for his political activity. He was somehow forced to settle in London and at last, became a professor of Italian Language and Literature at King’s College, London.

Her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti , was a famous poet of the Victorian period. She had another brother, William Michael Rossetti , who was also quite remarkable as a man of letters of the time. Both of her brothers were at their best as poets but Christina, too, was no less for her poetic talent. She proved, too, the poetess of several well known poems. Infact, the Rossetti family lived in a cosmopolitan atmosphere, full of culture and intellectualism. There was a perfect combination of English and Italian in them.

 Christina’s first volume of poetry was published when she was herdhy seventeen, Her brothers D.G. Rossetti form the Pre-Raphaetite Brotherhood with the help of likeminded persons. C.G. Rossetti was also interested in the group and contributed poems and articles to the Pre-Raphaelite journal, The Germ. The Pre-Raphaelites were both the painters and the poets and their poetry had much of painting, just as their painting was fed by poetry.

 

C.G. Rossetti had contacts with some of the persons belonging to the Pre-Raphaelite group. One of them was a poet-painter James Collinson with thom she grew intimate. They were even engaged in 1848, but Tames embraced the Roman catholic religion which Christina could not accept. Their engagement naturally got broken.

Christina passed a lonely gloomy life in religious meditation and nursing her sick father. Of course, her health was not well and her observations of the hard practices of the Anglican religion worsened it. She actually grew old and sick and finally died of cancer in 1894.

Miss Rossetti’s poetic career, as noted earlier, started quite early in her life. It started, when she was hardly eleven years old. She wrote and circulated her verse prevately therefrom. The Germ, published by her brothers and their associates, which happened to be the mouthpiece of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, contained a number of her writings, published, time to time.

In fact, that mouthpiece of the pre-Raphaelite movement proved to initiate and inspire Christina’s poetical journey, Goblin Market and other poems. The ‘Goblin Markeť proved to be a popular work of the time and was commended widely and highly in the learned circle. The collection, too, came to be recognized as the representative poetical expression of the pre-Raphaelite movement. Miss Rossetti’s aesthetic religiosity is found well borne out here.

Goblin Market and other Poems was followed by Rossetti’s next other volumes The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, A Pageant and Other Poems, Three Stages, Enrica, In the Bleak Midwinter, and so on. Some of Christina’s Christian poetry include ‘Noble Sisters’, ‘Maud Claire’ and ‘The Convent Threshold’. Her holy approach and deep faith in divine mercy are clearly expressed in poems such as ‘Dost Thou Not Care?’, ‘Lord What I Have To Offer?’, ‘The Fields are white’ and ‘What Good Shall My Life Do Me?’

Christina’s poetry are marked with her arduous faith, noble love and interest in ballad meter and the touches of mystery and magic. Finally, her poems are absolutely feminine in nature. Indeed, she stands for feminine sisterhood and feminine suzereignty or feminine conviction in life and sisterhood.

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Christina Georgina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti

 

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