Men and Women (poetry)
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| Men and Women (poetry) | |
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| Name | Men and Women |
| Author | Christina Rossetti |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry collection |
| Publisher | Smith, Elder & Co. |
| Pub date | 1855 |
Men and Women (poetry) is an 1855 collection of verse by Christina Rossetti that consolidated her reputation among Victorian poets alongside contemporaries such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Robert Browning. The volume contains dramatic monologues, lyrics, and narrative pieces that engage with figures and motifs drawn from Bible, Greek mythology, Dante Alighieri, and historical personae like Mary, Queen of Scots and Joan of Arc. Its publication situates Rossetti within mid‑19th century literary networks connected to publishers like Smith, Elder & Co. and to movements associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Oxford Movement.
Background and Publication
Rossetti composed poems in the social milieu that included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Elizabeth Siddal, and patrons such as William Morris. The book was issued by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1855, shortly before collections by Matthew Arnold and after major volumes by Tennyson and Browning. Its release followed Rossetti's participation in London literary circles frequented by figures like Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë, and during debates animated by critics including John Stuart Mill and Walter Pater. The collection's paratext and dedication practices reflect contemporary publishing customs shared with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and commercial houses such as Macmillan Publishers.
Structure and Content
The book assembles a series of linked poems, setpieces, and dramatic monologues that evoke biblical narratives, medieval legend, and Romantic lyricism familiar from William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Major poems reference figures like Mary Magdalene, Rachel (biblical figure), and legendary characters comparable to treatments by Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. Rossetti's use of dialogue and persona aligns her with the dramatic monologue tradition advanced by Browning and later adopted by poets such as W. B. Yeats. The ordering of poems foregrounds contrasts between masculine and feminine voices, echoing gendered personae present in the writings of George Eliot and satirical responses by figures like Anthony Trollope.
Themes and Style
Rossetti explores themes of love, mortality, faith, and penitence in language resonant with Bible diction, medieval devotional writers like Thomas à Kempis, and the aesthetic sensibilities associated with Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. Her prosody shows influence from Tennyson and the balladry of William Blake, combining music‑like meters with image patterns reminiscent of John Keats. Recurrent motifs include martyrdom, visionary encounters, and refracted desire, connecting to subjects treated by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christabel (Coleridge), and liturgical poets. Rossetti's syntax, enjambment, and use of archaic diction have affinities with Thomas Hardy's later narrative experimentation and anticipations of Symbolist aesthetics pursued by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine.
Critical Reception and Impact
Contemporary reviews placed Rossetti alongside canonical figures: reviewers compared her craft to Tennyson and noted affinities with Browning's psychological immediacy, while dissenting voices invoking editors of Edinburgh Review engaged debates prevalent in periodicals like The Athenaeum and The Quarterly Review. Victorian critics addressed religious sensibility in the collection in terms similar to commentary on John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement. By the late 19th century, critics from the circles of Mathew Arnold and editors of Swinburne's circle reappraised Rossetti, and early 20th‑century anthologists such as Sir Sidney Lee and H. Buxton Forman included selections in surveys alongside Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Influence on Later Poets and Movements
Men and Women shaped subsequent developments in narrative and confessional modes: poets in the Anglo‑Irish tradition like W. B. Yeats and aesthetes associated with Oscar Wilde acknowledged Rossetti's economy of image and mythic reframing. The collection's interplay of devotional lyric and theatrical persona informed modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in their adaptation of allusive technique, while women poets including Christina Rossetti's heirs—Christina Rossetti's contemporaries echoed by Christina]—and later figures like Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Jennings, and Adrienne Rich traced a lineage of female poetic voice negotiating faith and desire. Rossetti's blending of medievalism and psychological portraiture also resonated in the work of D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, and the Symbolists of continental Europe, influencing theatrical experiments by playwrights and lyricists connected to Edward Bond and operatic adaptations staged at venues like Covent Garden.
Category:1855 poetry books Category:British poetry collections