New Selected Poems

The first Rossetti Selected to take seriously recent feminist, queer, as well as religious re-readings of her poetry. Since C.H. Sisson’s ground-breaking Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1984), Christina Rossetti’s readership has burgeoned. Almost a century ago Ford Madox Ford claimed her as ‘the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced,’ and—Valentine Cunningham recently declared—she now sits at top table with Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, and Barrett Browning. It is no longer necessary to read her merely as a pale Pre-Raphaelite: her originality, her prosody, and her themes are all her own. This new Selected Poems builds on Sisson’s work, refusing to confine Rossetti’s technical and allusive brilliance to any one moment or tradition. Feminist and queer scholars have laid claim to Rossetti, but her Anglo-Catholic faith was never incidental to the power of even her most secular poems and is at the heart of her imaginative work. As an Anglican priest and poet, Rachel Mann in her selection appreciates Rossetti’s ambition while attending to recent scholarship that focuses on the religious, feminist, and fantastical elements in her work.

Rachel Mann is an Anglican parish priest and writer. She was Poet-in-Residence at Manchester Cathedral between 2009 and 2017 and is the author of five books. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was born in London and educated at home. She was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites through her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her first collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), was extremely successful and was followed by The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866) and A Pageant and Other Poems (1881).