1. • Name : Vagh vanita R.
• Roll no : 14
• Paper : Victorian literature
• Topic : The Pre-Raphaelite school of poetry
• Year : 2013

2. Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood
• The Pre-RapaeliteBrotherhood :
in London, 1848.
• a group of painters, poets, and
critics- Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
John Everett Millais and William
Holman Hunt.

3. Begining. . .
• The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood was founded in
John Millais's parents' house
on Gower Street.
• Hunt had started Panting the
Eve of St. Agnes based on
Keats's poem.

4. Salient Feature
• Salient Feature of Pre-Raphaelite
Poetry
1. Break with Tradition
2. Medievalism
3. Devotion to Detail
4. Sensuousness
5. Fleshly School of Poetry
6. Meter and Music

5. 1. Break with Tradition
• None of the Pre-Raphaelites
concerns himself with sordid
realism and the mundane
issues of his day, but excapes
to a dream world of his own
making.

6. 2.Medievalism
• Some Pre-Raphaelites, such as Hunt
and Millais the painter, were
somewhat sceptical of medievalism
but Rossetti and Morris, in particular,
felt a compulsive fascination for the
romance, chivalry, gorgeousness,
mystery and supematuralism of the
Middle Ages.
Victorian British Painting:
William Holman Hunt

7. 3. Devotion to Detail
• The details we have been talking about are purely
visual in painting, but in poetry they may be auditory
as well as visual. Pre-Raphaelite poets love both
visual and auditory details.
• As an illustration of the abundance of auditory
details, see the following passage from Rossetti’s My
Sister’s Sleep:
– Twelve struck. The sound, by dwindling years
Heard in each hour crept off, and then
The ruffled silence spread again
Like water that a pebble stirs.
Our mother rose from where she sat:
Her needles, as she laid them down,
Met lightly, and her silken gown
Settled; no other noise than that.

8. 4.Sensuousness
• Referring to Rossetti, Compton-Rickett
observes: “That the pictorial element is more
insistent in Rossetti than in Keats is obviously
due to the fact that Rossetti’s outlook on the
world is essentially that of the painter. He
thinks and feels in pigments.” But this thinking
and feeling “in pigments” sometimes leads the
Pre- Raphaelites to excess.

9. 5.Fleshy school of Poetry
• A charge of voluptuousness
brought against the poetry of
this school. Robert Buchanan
called the Pre-Raphaelite
Poetry “Fleshy School of
Poetry”.

10. 6.Meter and Music
• Legouis observes: “Vowels call to vowels and
consonants to consonants, and these links
often seem stronger than the links of thought
or imagery.” According to Compton-Rickett,
Swinburne’s effects are harmonic rather than
melodic. As an instance, see the following lines
from his Tristram of Lyonesse (1882):
• ex-
• Nor shall they feel or fear, whose date is done,
Aught that made once more dark the living sun
And bitterer in their breathing lips the breath
Than the dark dawn and bitter dust of death.