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Clive Wilmer
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Maundering Medievalism: D.G. Rossetti and William Morris as Poets

Morris's first Book, The Defence of Guinevere (1858), is dedicated 'To my friend/ Dante Gabriel Rossetti/ Painter'. The poetry of both men was to be championed by Walter Pater and excoriated by Robert Buchanan, both critics identifying them as, in effect, leaders of the new Aesthetic movement. Morris and Edward Burne-Jones regarded themselves as Rossetti's disciples, the collaborative and communal basis of their lives and work being modelled to a large degree on Rossetti's habitual patterns of behaviour. In the early 1870s, however, there was a parting of the ways, largely as a result of Rossetti's involvement with Morris's wife and Rossetti's subsequent breakdown. But there is also evidence that Morris had begun to lose sympathy with Rossetti's work. He described his discovery of Icelandic literature, with its masculine vigour and its 'worship of Courage', as providing 'a good corrective to the more maundering side of medievalism'. Shortly afterwards, he restructured the firm of Morris and Company, forcibly removing Rossetti and his intimates from their partnerships. He then began committing himself to various public activities, notably in the 1880s to the nascent Socialist movement. This was in marked contrast to Rossetti's deliberately apolitical stance. It will be the purpose of this paper to consider what it was that Rossetti and Morris shared and, more importantly, whether their subsequent deviations can be traced to fundamental differences detectable in their poetry from the start.