3 - Ut Pictura Poesis: early Pre-Raphaelite poetry and the case of The Germ

Summary

From the first, figures of dead women appeared not only in Pre- Raphaelite painting but also in poetry as evidenced by works published in the short-lived periodical The Germ which ran for four issues in 1850. The Germ is key to an understanding of both writers and painters since it allows us to find, in an embryonic stage of development, the particular twinning of the visual and the verbal central to the early rationale of the Pre-Raphaelites. As the contents of the journal testify, poetry and both fictional and non-fictional prose were central to the aims of the group. However, The Germ was a commercial failure; folding after a run of four months, each of the single editions never sold more than two hundred copies. The journal has been regarded as a somewhat contradictory product of Pre-Raphaelitism owing to a disjunction between its physical appearance – its heavy Gothic typeface – and its claims to a radical stance on religion and morality in art. Yet, the significance of the sub-title, ‘Thoughts Towards Nature and Art’ that came to replace the original title in the February issue and encodes a vital reference to Ruskin, provides recognizable grounds for the twinned mediums of word and visual image that it would continue to promote. Moreover, as I've argued elsewhere, the replacement title advertised the very intertextual nature of the journal, thereby intervening in the rigid genre division and ‘sister arts analogies of reviewers’ (Smith 123).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's ‘My Sister's Sleep’ appeared in the first issue of the magazine. W. M. Rossetti believes it to be dated before his brother's ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and ‘therefore before May 1847’ (Germ 8). Remarking upon Dante Gabriel's early use of what was to become known as the ‘In Memoriam rhymescheme’ following the publication of Tennyson's poem of that name in 1850, he goes on to make much of his brother's later ‘distaste’ for the poem, maintaining that D. G. Rossetti ‘only reluctantly reprinted it in his Poems 1870. At the same time, W. M. Rossetti makes the rather odd claim that ‘this poem was written long before the Pre-Raphaelite movement began’ while adding that it ‘none the less […] shows in an eminent degree one of the influences which guided that movement; the intimate intertexture of a spiritual sense with a material form; small actualities made vocal of lofty meanings’ (Germ 8).