Christina Rosetti - Critics

INDIVIDUAL CRITICS

C.M Bowra

“Rigorous though Christina’s denial of love was, it was not strong enough to curb all of her womanly and human instincts”… “she could not from time to time prevent them from bursting into almost heart-rending poetry, which is all the more powerful because it rises from not controlled thoughts but from longing”

“In Christina love released a melancholy desire for death, and for a kind of death not closely connected with her usual ideas of an afterworld”

George P. Landlow (on ‘When I am dead, my dearest’)

“The note of complete indifference on which Christina Rossetti ends this poem is particularly shocking when seen in the context of male tradition. Rossetti’s speaker does not pine for her male partner to join her; indeed, she suggests that she has increasing difficulty in remembering him at all- and that’s not a matter of concern or regret.”

“a new female voice reconfigures the poetic tradition”

GOBLIN MARKET

William Rossetti

"she did not mean anything profound by this fairy tale- it is not a moral apologue consistently carried out in detail”

Sandra M Gilbert

“Goblin market depicts multiple heroines, each representing alternative possibilities of selfhood for women”

“It is quite possible that laura too- sucking on the goblin fruit, asserting and indulging her own desires “without restraint” - is enacting an intellectual (or poetic) as well as sexual selfhood.”

“That genius and sexuality are diseases in women, diseases akin to madness, is implies in “Goblin Market”