SOURCE: Boos, Florence S. “‘The Banners of the Spring to Be’: The Dialectical Pattern of Morris's Later Poetry.” English Studies 81, no. 1 (February 2000): 14-40.

In the following essay, Boos provides an “inclusive and eclectic view” of Morris's poetic development.

William Morris's contemporaries viewed him primarily as the author of The Earthly Paradise, and to a lesser extent of The Life and Death of Jason and a few later works. Most later critics sharply reversed this judgment, in favor of The Defence of Guenevere, which they interpreted as a youthful proto-modernist text of implosive intensity.¹ This profile persists, for example, in Fiona MacCarthy's comprehensive biography, William Morris: A Life for Our Time. MacCarthy makes some sustained efforts to evaluate the poems on their own aesthetic terms, but reimposes the usual canon in her summary assessment: ‘I would not press the claims of Morris's own favourite Sigurd the Volsung; it is...