23 - Christina Rossetti

Summary

When Christina Rossetti died in December 1894, the obituary notices and reviews began the process of canonization. In his ‘Reminiscences’, Theodore Watts, a friend of the Rossetti family, recalled that Christina ‘seemed to breathe a sainthood that must needs express itself in poetry’, thus linking her well-known spiritual devotion to her lyrics and grounding her poetic achievement in ‘the inspiration of the religious devotee’. Watts was extreme in seeking to canonize both the person and the poet, but his emphasis on Rossetti’s religious inspiration, seclusion from the world, and freedom from taint of the marketplace became a common strain. The Catholic poet Katharine Tynan called her ‘Santa Christina’. Alice Meynell, a poet with a reputation for being an angel in the house, honoured Rossetti as a ‘woman of genius’, and as a ‘poet and saint’. Alexander Smellie echoed this view in his account of a life ‘spent, not in the publicity of the market, but in utter quiet and seclusion’, and in his belief that her ‘inspiration had its roots in her piety’. In Christina Rossetti’s life and work, these reviewers found an antidote to the professionalism of the late Victorian literary market, and an alternative to the writer with an eye on celebrity and commercial success rather than on aesthetic achievement. To nineteenth-century readers Rossetti was a poet’s poet, an artist devoted to art. Most considered her to be the finest devotional poet of the century, perhaps second in the English tradition only to George Herbert. Tynan concluded, ‘Christina Rossetti stands head and shoulders above all other women who have written English poetry.’