SOURCE: "'The Bitterness of Things Occult': D. G. Rossetti's Search for the Real," in Critical Essays on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, edited by David G. Reide, Twayne, 1992, pp. 113-27.

In the following essay, originally published in Victorian Poetry in 1982, McGowan probes Rossetti's attempts to reconcile art and reality in his poetry.

In his Autobiography, Yeats claims that Dante Rossetti, "though his dull brother did once persuade him that he was agnostic," was a "devout Christian."¹ This description is wildly inaccurate, yet it indicates one way to read Rossetti's poetry. Rossetti accepts the traditional Christian notion that man confronts a created world which contains within it certain universal meanings. The artist's task is to uncover those meanings and to present them to an audience, a task which involves a certain amount of interpretation. Rossetti's problem is that he cannot get the world to speak to him; its meanings continually elude...