Poetry – a male preserve?

Poetry – a male preserve?

Up to around fifty years ago, most people would have struggled when asked to name a famous female poet. The poetry canon was dominated by figures like the Romantics, (blogged about last week), Shakespeare, Donne and Herbert, Pope, Tennyson and Eliot. Unlike today, only a few women poets ever made it into print or continued to be read after their lifetime.

The achievement of the few that did is therefore all the more remarkable. The work of the Brontë sisters (see August blog), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti has continued to speak to new generations of readers. The latter is perhaps less familiar than her contemporaries. She does not have the romance of illicit relationships, or dramatic landscapes attached to her name.

Quietly powerful

Instead, Rossetti lived quietly in London for most of her life, single and dogged by ill health. Yet her poetry is powerful and direct, illuminating friendship and fear, faith and death. Through her individual perspective she touches on a universal experience.

Allusions explained

Many readers today will not be familiar with the social and religious world that Rossetti inhabited, and feel somewhat daunted at approaching her poetry because of this. One of the reasons that Crossref-it.info came into existence was to provide just the kind of help that allows readers to access works of literature peppered with allusions – in this case biblical ones.

Through her poetry Rossetti was opening up many issues close to her heart; it helps to see what she meant when she referred to paths and ladders, blood and brokenness. The brand new guide to The poems of Christina Rossetti will give students and teachers all the information they need in order to fully enjoy her work.