Painting in Poetry and Poetry in Painting: Aesthetic Reflections in D.G. Rossetti

Abstract

Bright eyed and bushy-tailed poems and paintings are very rare, so are their past masters who create them. The history of the world literature is often brimming with such rare authors as are the unparalleled amalgamator of paintings and writings. In this field, the names, which are counted highly with boundless esteem, are of William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Elizabeth Bishop, Leo Tolstoy, Lorraine Hansberry, Victor Hugo, Sylvia Plath, George Sand, Jack Kerouac, Herman Hesse, Gunter Grass, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, E.E. Cummings, Tennessee Williams, Carlo Levi, J.B. Priestley, and R.N. Tagore. Undisputedly, D.G. Rossetti is one such figure. When the world literature is deconstructed, two clusters of the authors appear on the literary landscape. The first cluster consists of those authors who are painters and writers as well. The painters who have painted the literary pieces of the authors fall into the second cluster. D.G. Rossetti somewhere stands in- between. He is painter (especially illustrator) as well author-poet. But the flabbergasting certitude is that his elite poetry is found in his pieces of mural, and his elite mural in his pieces of poesy. His all creations, be they paintings, or poems, fall in three categories. In the first faction fall such pieces of his poems as are only poems—without any illustration, in the second faction fall such pieces of his paintings as are without poems, while in the third faction fall such pieces of his paintings as are with poems, or with mythical illustrations, or on certain literary pieces. Nothing to say about these groups, but one thing is clear that all of them possess aesthetic reflections. Keeping this very fact in mind, the present article aims at exploring, analyzing, and presenting the three-dimensional view in Rossetti painting and poetry with the help of the textual analysis, visual methods, and descriptive and explorative approach.