Glossary of Poetic Terms

An artistic movement founded in 1848 by the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, who is often credited with the group’s name, which indicates not a dismissal of the Italian painter Raphael, but rejection of strict aesthetic adherence to the principles of composition and light characteristic of his style. The Pre-Raphaelites’ commitment to sincerity, simplicity, and moral seriousness is evident in the contemplative but uncomplicated subjects of its poetry (as in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge”) and in the religious, mythical, and literary subjects depicted in its paintings. Christina Rossetti was both a close associate and critic of the group; her poem “Dream Land” was published in the Brotherhood’s periodical The Germ, which ran a total of four issues in 1850. Her poem “In the Artist’s Studio” offers a critique of the Pre-Raphaelites’ treatment of their female subjects, describing a painter who renders a woman “not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” Algernon Charles Swinburne and George Meredith were among the various authors associated with the group’s members. While a relatively short-lived movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had a profoundly influential effect on the course of Victorian literature and art.