Keats and The Pre-Rephaelites

The present book studies the growth and development of the pre-Raphaelite movement in painting and a similar movement in poetry and the close relation of these with the poetry of Keats. It studies the salient characteristics of the movement in painting and traces these in the poetry of the Rossettis, Morris and Swinburne. Their poetry is not all attributable to the influence of painting on poetry from that of poetry on painting. All the similarities, between the poetry of Keats and that of Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites could not have been international on the part of the latter. The pre-Raphaelites did not find the movement clearly defined and practiced in Keats’s poetry. The interest attached to a study of Keats along with pre-Raphaelites consists in tracing how closely allied was Keats to the pre-Raphaelites in his temperament and how closely he had anticipated the movement in his poetry. Pre-Raphaelites’ influence on minor poets and decadents has also been amply focused. The decadents deny the mediaeval aspects of pre-Raphaelitism but they focus attention on the themes of the pre-Raphaelites and they trace them in the work of the Renaissance artists.