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The House Of Life [ By: Dante Gabriel Rossetti ]

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ABout the Book
The House of Life

This version of DGR's celebrated work is the one best known, as well as the one that he left in a most finished condition. But no “definitive” version of the sequence can be presented because, in fact, DGR left the work as he originally conceived and originally described it: as a project “Towards a Work to be Called ‘The House of Life’”. See the commentaries for the “Sonnets and Songs Towards a Work to be Called ‘The House of Life’” (published in 1870), for the group of verses known as “The Kelmscott Love Sonnets” (presented to Mrs. Morris as a gift in 1874), and the original sixteen sonnet version first published in March 1869 in the Fortnightly Review, “Of Life, Love, and Death: Sixteen Sonnets”.

Unlike the 1870 and 1874 states of the project, this version lacks any “Songs” as a component part of the sequence. It also differs from those two previous states in the depth to which it takes its exploration of the experience of Love, which is the work's dominant subject. Both the 1870 and the 1881 states of the work study and pursue the “difficult deeps of love” in a way that is avoided nearly altogether in the 1874 state of the work. The 1874 work is nearly altogether celebratory.

One other matter of general import should be noted. The ambiguous character of the work is sharply increased in the 1881 text. This happens largely because DGR gathers into this state of the work sonnets that relate to so many different times and circumstances. The sequence thereby torques individual sonnets into meanings and relations that would not otherwise have been available to them. The effect is particularly notable in the “Change and Fate” section of the sequence because that is where DGR forces together so many sonnets that come from so many diverse original contexts.

About the Author
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882

Poet and painter, was born in London. His father was Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian scholar, who came to England in 1824, and was Prof. of Italian in King’s College, London. His mother was Frances Polidori, English on her mother’s side, so that the poet was three-fourths Italian, and one-fourth English. He was ed. at King’s College School, and began the systematic study of painting in 1842, and in 1848, with Holman Hunt, Millais, and others, founded the pre-Raphaelite school of painting. In 1849 he exhibited the “Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” and among his other pictures are “Beata Beatrix,” “Monna Vanna,” and “Dante’s Dream.” Simultaneously with art he worked hard at poetry, and by 1847 he had written The Blessed Damozel and Hand and Soul (both of which appeared in the Germ, the magazine of the pre-Raphaelites), Retro me Sathanas, The Portrait, and The Choice, and in 1861 he brought out a vol. of translations from the early Italian poets under the title of Dante and his Circle. The death of his wife in 1862, after a married life of less than two years, told heavily upon him, as did various attacks upon his poetry, including that of Robert Buchanan — The Fleshly School of Poetry — to which he replied with The Stealthy School of Criticism. His Poems which, in the vehemence of his grief, he had buried in the coffin of his wife, and which were afterwards exhumed, appeared in 1870; and his last literary effort, Ballads and Sonnets, containing the sonnets forming The House of Life, in 1881. In his later years he suffered acutely from neuralgia, which led to the habit of taking chloral. Rossetti was fastidious in composition; his poems are as remarkable for condensation, finish, and exact expression of the poet’s thought as for their sumptuous colouring and rich concrete imagery. In later years he was subject to depression, and became somewhat embittered, and much of a recluse.