{"id":177,"date":"2020-01-09T13:40:50","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T18:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/?page_id=177"},"modified":"2020-04-21T14:42:28","modified_gmt":"2020-04-21T19:42:28","slug":"poetic-passions","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/home\/poetic-passions\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetic Passions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[UD_EXHIBITION_ITEM]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, Elizabeth Barrett had a passion for poetry. Then, Robert Browning had a passion for Elizabeth Barrett\u2019s poetry. Soon, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning developed a passion for each other. Eventually, defying her tyrannical father, they eloped to Italy in 1846 and lived happily, if too briefly, ever after with their only child, \u201cPen\u201d (1849\u20131912). Almost every late-Victorian writer grew up with this story and saw in it the ideal heterosexual romance. In the twentieth century, Rudolf Besier (1878\u20131942) breathed new life into it with his play The Barretts of Wimpole Street<\/em> (1930), but Virginia Woolf (1882\u20131941) reveled in \u201cqueering\u201d it, with Flush: A Biography<\/em> (1933), and made the deeper love that between Elizabeth and her dog. On display here is a photograph of Elizabeth\u2014a copy of a daguerreotype by Macaire. Alongside it is one of her with \u201cPen\u201d (Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning)\u2014an image taken in Rome and sent by the Brownings to the Pre-Raphaelite writer William Michael Rossetti (1829\u20131919).
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[UD_EXHIBITION_ITEM]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dramatic monologues proved the perfect vehicles through which Robert Browning could not merely represent, but inhabit<\/em>, the passions of others in poetic form. Some of those passions\u2014especially the ones that involved the aspirations or frustrations of musicians and artists\u2014were feelings that he could share as a creative figure still on the cusp of achieving renown, but not there yet. He inscribed this copy of Men and Women<\/em>\u2014which contained poems with Italian settings, such as \u201cFra Lippo Lippi\u201d and \u201cA Toccata of Galuppi\u2019s\u201d\u2014just as he and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had eloped in 1846, were at the end of a six-week-long visit to London and were about to leave for Florence. The recipient was George Moulton Barrett (1816\u20131895), one of Elizabeth\u2019s brothers and the first family member to accept her marriage, to which their father would never be reconciled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828\u20131882. <\/strong>Poems: Privately Printed, July to Decr. 1869<\/strong><\/em>. [London: Strangeways and Walden, 1869\u20131870]. Alice Boyd\u2019s bound proofs for Rossetti\u2019s 1870\u00a0<\/strong>Poems<\/strong><\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After decades in which he was primarily a painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti turned passionately and obsessively to writing new poems and reworking old ones in the two years preceding the publication of Poems <\/em>(1870). To revise the older ones required, quite horrifyingly, the exhumation in 1869 of a notebook containing the sole manuscripts of some of them\u2014a notebook he had rashly placed in the coffin of his wife, Elizabeth Siddall (1829\u20131862), before she was interred at Highgate Cemetery. The official publication of Poems <\/em>was preceded by a long succession of proofs. Shown here was one presented by Rossetti to the painter Alice Boyd (1825\u20131897), who studied (and was in an adulterous relationship) with Rossetti\u2019s fellow Pre-Raphaelite, William Bell Scott (1811\u20131890). While preparing Poems<\/em>, Rossetti stayed with Boyd and Bell Scott at Penkill Castle, her home in Scotland. This copy belonged to Simon Nowell-Smith (1909\u20131996), the Secretary of the London Library and Mark Samuels Lasner\u2019s chief mentor in book collecting. It is open to one of the recovered poems, \u201cJenny,\u201d where a male speaker imagines the unspoken thoughts of a prostitute and considers the effects on women of dividing them into the \u201cpure\u201d and the \u201cfall\u2019n.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828\u20131882. <\/strong>Poems.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0London: F. S. Ellis, 1870. Author’s presentation copy to Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, inscribed \u201cTo Mdme Bodichon with D. G. Rossetti’s friendly regards April 1870.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was a talented painter, but her passion for women\u2019s rights drove Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827\u20131891) to polemical writing and to political activism. As one of the founders of Girton College and an early supporter of women\u2019s suffrage, she led campaigns for social justice and moved in radical circles. Most famous for her intimate friendship with George Eliot, she was also close to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his model Elizabeth Siddall, who became a poet and artist herself and who married him in 1860. They had stayed in 1854 with Bodichon at her country house, where she drew the delicate, idealized portrait of Siddall included in this exhibition. After Rossetti published his 1870 volume Poems<\/em>, making use of texts from the notebook he had buried in Siddall\u2019s coffin in 1862 and exhumed seven years later, he inscribed this copy to Bodichon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oscar Wilde. 1854\u20131900. <\/strong>On the Sale by Auction of Keats\u2019 Love Letters,<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0autograph manuscript, [November\u2013December 1885].<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like a number of Aesthetic Movement poets and critics, Oscar Wilde was a passionate devotee of the works of John Keats (1795\u20131821). The public offering of several of Keats\u2019s intimate letters to Fanny Brawne (1800\u20131865) so offended Wilde that he composed this sonnet in protest against \u201cthe brawlers of the auction mart.\u201d His sense of outrage, however, did not get in the way of his own bidding at the 1885 sale. Wilde enclosed this manuscript in a letter\u2014also in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection\u2014to the editor and author William Sharp (1855\u20131905), who published the poem in a volume titled Sonnets of This Century<\/em> (1886).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

W. B. (William Butler) Yeats, 1865\u20131939. <\/strong>The Wanderings of Oisin: And Other Poems<\/strong><\/em>. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1889. Author\u2019s presentation copy, inscribed \u201cMiss May Morris with the good wishes of W. B. Yeats Jan 19th 1889.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That passions are fleeting and none, including love, are eternally fulfilling is a theme running through the title poem in this, W. B. Yeats\u2019s first book of poetry. Critics have often complained of weakness in this early work about the pagan Oisin\u2019s three-hundred-year-long quest, seeing Yeats\u2019s epic as too indebted\u2014despite its use of Celtic materials\u2014to Pre-Raphaelite models. William Morris had welcomed the young Irish-born poet into his home, and Yeats was indeed influenced by him; so were his two sisters, who were close to Morris\u2019s daughter, May (1862\u20131938), and who worked alongside her in the Arts-and-Crafts Movement. Yeats presented this copy of The Wanderings of Oisin<\/em> to May Morris, hoping that her father would read it. As he later reported in The Trembling of the Veil<\/em> (1922), Morris did so and began to praise it, \u201cand he would have said more had he not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp-post and got very heated upon that subject.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[UD_EXHIBITION_ITEM]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was scarcely a more prodigiously gifted late-Victorian family in the whole of the British Isles than that of the Irish-born artist John Butler Yeats. Among his six children were a painter; a printer and publisher; an Arts-and-Crafts embroiderer; and, of course, the chief poet and dramatist of the Celtic Revival, William Butler Yeats (1865\u20131939). By 1903 (the year of this portrait sketch), W. B. Yeats had turned from his earlier involvement with London-based Aesthetes, through the Rhymers\u2019 Club and Yellow Book<\/em> circles, to focus more intently on Irish nationalist projects, including the development of an Irish theatre. Also by 1903, he had met the Irish American collector John Quinn (1870\u20131924), who became a financial supporter of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, as well as a passionate acquirer of Yeats\u2019s work. Quinn, who lived in New York City, owned this drawing by John Butler Yeats of his son, which captured beautifully the poet\u2019s magnetism and glamour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[UD_EXHIBITION_ITEM] First, Elizabeth Barrett had a passion for poetry. Then, Robert Browning had a passion for Elizabeth Barrett\u2019s poetry. Soon, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning developed a passion for each other. Eventually, defying her tyrannical father, they eloped to Italy in 1846 and lived happily, if too briefly, ever after with their only child, \u201cPen\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":167,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-exhibition.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-177","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/177\/revisions\/285"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}