Christina Rossetti

Who Was Christina Rossetti?

Christina Georgina Rossetti was the finest religious poet of the Victorian era and one of the greatest English-language poets of the nineteenth century. Born in London to an Italian father and an Anglo-Italian mother, she grew up in a household saturated with art and literature — her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti would become the central figure of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Christina herself remained somewhat apart from the Brotherhood’s aesthetic program, though her early poem Goblin Market (1862) was illustrated by her brother and became one of the movement’s most celebrated texts.

Her faith was the animating center of her life and her art. A devout Anglican who declined two marriage proposals on religious grounds, she poured her emotional and intellectual energies into a body of devotional poetry of remarkable range and depth. Her sonnet sequence Monna Innominata reimagines the conventions of the Petrarchan love sonnet from the perspective of the unnamed woman, recasting romantic longing as a figure for the soul’s longing for God. Her Sing-Song nursery rhymes and her great devotional collections — Goblin Market and Other Poems, The Prince’s Progress, A Pageant and Other Poems — establish her as a poet of extraordinary formal range and theological seriousness.

She is perhaps best known today for the Christmas poem that begins “In the bleak mid-winter” — a text set to music so often that it has become part of the liturgical furniture of Anglophone Christianity. But her achievement goes far beyond any single poem. She is, with Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Victorian poet who most fully inhabited the tension between aesthetic beauty and ascetic faith — and who found, in that tension, not contradiction but the specific pressure that produces her finest work.

In Her Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)
• The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866)
• Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872)
• A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)
• Monna Innominata (1881) — sonnet sequence
• The Face of the Deep (1892) — devotional commentary on Revelation