Female Poets and the Dark Side of Life Essay -- Rossetti Poetry Poems

Female Poets and the Dark Side of Life During the mid-nineteenth century many female poets including Christina Rossetti seemed to lean upon the dark side of life presenting very dark and shadowed emotions within their poetry. Yet this is not to say that they were depressed but in many ways in can be inferred that these dark themes may have been influenced by the era in which they were living. Many historians have suggested that the second half of the nineteenth century was culturally, a rather strange period. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was started in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, as a reaction against what they saw as the stale, formula-driven art produced by the Royal Academy at the time. They aimed to go back to a more genuine art, exemplified as they saw it by the work of the Nazarenes, and rooted in realism and truth to nature. The Pre-Raphaelites, being young, talented, and having many ideas of their own, felt stifled by the rigidity of the Royal Academy's idea of what tasteful, beautiful art should be. ...