SOURCE: "Rossetti's 'On the Field of Waterloo': An Intertextual Reading," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 30, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 179-82.

In the following essay, Fontana examines Rossetti's "On the Field of Waterloo" in relation to William Wordsworth's earlier poem on the same subject.

As many of his critics have demonstrated, most recently Antony H. Harrison, 3 forms of intertextuality constitute a central feature of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetry.¹ For Harrison, many of Rossetti's poems, such as "A Portrait" (whose chief pre-text is in his view Browning's "My Last Duchess"), are "deliberate intertexts, works which manipulate palimpsests parodically in order both to resist the social actuality which obsessed his contemporaries and to open up new 'tracks' for future writers." For Harrison, what is distinct about Rossetti's use of intertextuality is its "tentative and oblique repudiation, subversion, and devaluation of conventional ideological statement" and its "reconstitution of ideology in purely aesthetic terms."²

One...