With an Introduction and
Notes by Katherine McGowran
Christina Rossetti is widely regarded as the most considerable woman
poet in England before the twentieth century. No reading of nineteenth
century poetry can be complete without attention to this prolific and
popular poet. Rosetti’s inner life dominates her poetry, exploring
loss and unattainable hope. Her divine poems have a freshness and toughness
of thought, while many of her love poems are erotic, and as often express
love for women as for men. The varied threads of Rossetti's concerns
are drawn together in what is perhaps her greatest poem, the strange
and ambiguous. Goblin Market.304