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This book re-assesses the significance to Pre-Raphaelitism of the fundamental relationship of poem to painting, of
the visual to the verbal, to examine those aspects of the movement that account for its enduring legacy. Beginning
with the profound and somewhat neglected influence of Ruskins work upon the poets and painters, Smith focuses
in particular upon the Pre-Raphaelite rehabilitation of the sister arts analogy, and an aesthetic of ekphrasis as
played out in the short-lived periodical The Germ and in D.G. Rossettis sonnets for pictures. At the heart of the
project is a new reading of the notorious circumstances of Rossettis coffined book - those manuscript poems
Rossetti disinterred from his wife Elizabeth Siddals grave that brings to the fore the all-pervasive significance to
the Pre-Raphaelites of a complex aesthetic of resurrection. With this and other examples, Smith redefines for us
those categories of the corporeal and spiritual, the material and immaterial, the verbal and visual that the
Pre-Raphaelites aspired to re-conceptualise.
the visual to the verbal, to examine those aspects of the movement that account for its enduring legacy. Beginning
with the profound and somewhat neglected influence of Ruskins work upon the poets and painters, Smith focuses
in particular upon the Pre-Raphaelite rehabilitation of the sister arts analogy, and an aesthetic of ekphrasis as
played out in the short-lived periodical The Germ and in D.G. Rossettis sonnets for pictures. At the heart of the
project is a new reading of the notorious circumstances of Rossettis coffined book - those manuscript poems
Rossetti disinterred from his wife Elizabeth Siddals grave that brings to the fore the all-pervasive significance to
the Pre-Raphaelites of a complex aesthetic of resurrection. With this and other examples, Smith redefines for us
those categories of the corporeal and spiritual, the material and immaterial, the verbal and visual that the
Pre-Raphaelites aspired to re-conceptualise.