I wonder if the good folk at the end of the 19th century when this poem was originally published were just too obtuse to understand the gist of Rossetti's work; if so, we have an innocent artifact that has evolved into something erotic because of our twentieth century sensibilities (we have dirtier minds than our compatriots from the past).

Don't let the word "erotica" scare you away. This is not a blatantly sexual work in its language; it is not a "dirty" book. Just understand that despite what anyone else says or writes, this is about as unambiguously EROTIC as you can get. With phrasing like "Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make much of me; For your sake I have braved the glen; And had to do with goblin merchant men."

Since the original work is now in the public domain, if you want to read the full text online just do a search using most standard search engines with the terms "Christina Rossetti Goblin Market" and you should turn up a number of links to the actual poems, go read it, and decide for yourself about it.

This makes a wonderful gift for people you are very close too. However, it is also a very personal poem, and if given inappropriately could actually scare someone away!

A children tale for adults. It's a light and thoughtful reading. The story of two sisters and lewd goblin men. Innocence, temptation and emotions all together. This inspiring story has wonderful work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

This tale is not about sexuality but about redemption and the need to help others. Read deep into the story to find the meaning that Rossetti intended.

My mother loved the BBC radio production of this play, with Imogen Stubbs as Lizzie Siddal; I thought it was very good, but the book is better.

The only thing many people know about William Morris is his wallpaper, and of Rossetti is that he dug up his wife's grave to retrieve poems he'd buried with her (including poems to his mistress). Clever As Paint not only explains how someone could do something like that, but makes it seem like a reasonable thing to do. Siddal's ghost refusing to give him the wording to the poem seems natural as well - what wife would ever give her husband the text to a love poem written to another?

Clever as Paint is beautiful and useful: a very funny black comedy, based on solid historical research. It benefits from being read, and reread, since there are so many levels to the play. It's witty without sacrificing compassion and even though it is very funny, the despair and grief of Rossetti is genuine. The poetry quoted is glorious and the book includes sheet music for Siddal's poems composed by Elizabeth Parker.

This play is a delight for people who know nothing of the Rossettis, and a joy for those who do.

I bought this book for my husband who loves the work of Rossetti -- I found this book after scouring five different bookstores for collections and being disappointed with every other one I found.

This book has full-page prints of almost every painting he has ever done with detailed background information on the opposite page. The preface is facsinating -- it details his life as well as the evolution of his style. It is thorough and well-written; although it can't replace a complete biography on Rossetti, it comes close. It includes some of the sketches he had done as preliminary work as well.

The other books we found either reprinted his paintings as small pictures in the text (which of course limits your enjoyment and examination of them) or they only had a few of his pictures or the text was hopelessly stuffy and academic.

My husband loved the book... and so will you!

Next to the glory of his paintings, it's easy to forget that Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a talented poet as well. It's easy to overlook his written work, even such classics as "Jenny" and "The Blessed Damozel", and the sonnets.

In this lovely anthology, Jan Marsh -- the foremost authority on the Pre-Raphaelite circle -- has collected and arranged Rossetti's writings. Buy this book, and sample the elegance of Victorian literature, and the genius of Rossetti.

Genuine romance and passion is missing from most books, either fiction or nonfiction, and I don't think I've ever come across both in such quantity as there is in "La Vita Nuova" (translation: The New Life), the unsung masterpiece of poet Dante Alighieri (who wrote the classic Divina Comedia).

It is a series of poems centering around the life-changing love of Dante for a young woman named Beatrice. The two first met when they were young children, of about eight. Dante instantly fell in love with her, but didn't really interact with her for several years. Over the years, Dante's almost supernatural love only increased in intensity, and he poured out his feelings (grief, adoration, fear) into several poems and sonnets. During an illness, he has a vision about mortality, himself, and his beloved Beatrice ("One day, inevitably, even your most gracious Beatrice must die"). Beatrice died at the age of twenty-four, and Dante committed himself to the memory of his muse.

I have never in my life read a book overflowing with such incredible love and passion as "La Vita Nuova"; it's probably the most romantic book I have ever seen. It's only a little over a hundred pages long, but it's a truly unique love story. Dante and Beatrice were never romantically involved. In fact, both of them married other people.

But Dante's love for Beatrice shows itself to be more than infatuation or crush, because it never wanes -- in fact, it grows even stronger, including Love manifested as a nobleman in one of Dante's dreams. There is no element of physicality to the passion in "La Vita Nuova"; Dante talks about how beautiful Beatrice is, but that's only a sidenote. (We don't hear of any real details about her) And Dante's grief-stricken state when Beatrice dies (of what, we're never told) leads him to deep changes in his soul, and eventually peace. (And though Beatrice died, because of Dante's love for her and her placement in the "Comedia," she has achieved a kind of immortality)

One of the noticeable things about this book is that whenever something significant happens to Dante (good, bad, or neither), he immediately writes a poem about it. Some readers may be tempted to skip over the carefully constructed poems, but they shouldn't. Even if these intrude on the story, they show what Dante was feeling more clearly than his prose.

It's impossible to read this book and come out of it jaded about love or true passion. Not the sort of stuff in pulp romance novels, but love and passion that come straight from the heart and soul, in a unique and unusual love story. Every true romantic should read this book.

The "New Life" was occasioned by Dante's integration of his meeting of the divine Beatrice and the meaning she held for him in his own psyche. As such, it is an indispensable precursor to understanding his "Commedia" trilogy. This work is fascinating because through it we experience Dante's growth, from your run-of-the-mill medieval troubadour praising courtly love, to a man raised to the heights of ecstasy by way of his soul's true guide, Beatrice. A Jungian might say Beatrice was Dante's anima, projected onto a flesh-and-blood woman. But Beatrice is no malicious deciever (as Jung described); she is more akin to Goethe's meaning at the end of "Faust II"--"The eternal feminine/lures to perfection" or Joyce's tranfiguration at the sight of the maiden "gently stirring the water with her foot" in the "Portrait." Dante's work is brilliant not only because it reveals the spiritual urge lying beneath the veneer of romantic love (a collective illusion that our culture still labors under) but because Dante guides us through his own inner journey, from goo-goo-eyed adulator weeping because love 'hurts so good,' through his psychological turn within to question his own need for a woman's "pity," and on to his final integration of the feminine within, no longer dominated by his own unconscious need and able to follow Her from the depths of his own soul to the heights of glory. Mark Musa is also the translator of the highly touted Indiana Critical Edition of the "Commedia." But I found his translation occasionally stilted and unpoetic, when a few changes would have smoothed both verse and prose. The footnotes were nearly useless, their content was often obvious or uninformative. And they are very awkard to use: they are denoted in the text by an * rather than a number and keyed in the Appendix by page number. Unfortunately, only about half the pages are actually numbered, making the system cumbersome indeed. That said, I end with this: Read it and weep. And revel in its majesty.

La Vita Nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum, a work composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems composed over approximately a ten-year period. The Vita Nuova brought together Dante's poetic efforts from before 1283 to about 1292-93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work, contains Dante's most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of La Divina Commedia.

The Vita Nuova, which Dante called his libello, or little book, is a remarkable work. It contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a fifth canzoni is left dramatically interrupted by the death of Beatrice (perhaps Bice Portinari, a woman Dante met and fell in love with in 1274 but who died in 1290). In Beatrice, Dante created one of the most celebrated women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante's thoughts and career, Beatrice underwent enormous changes in his hands--sanctified in the Vita Nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented again in the Convivio, only to be returned with more profound comprehension in La Divina Commedia as the woman credited with having led Dante away from the "vulgar herd" to Paradise.

The prose commentary provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course, conceivable that some were actually written for occasions other than those alleged). The story, however, is simple enough and tells of Dante's first sight of Beatrice when both were nine years of age, her salutation when they were eighteen, Dante's expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante's anguish that she is making light of him, his determination to rise above the anguish and sing only of his lady's virtues, anticipations of her death in that of a young friend, the death of Beatrice's father, and Dante's own premonitory dream, and finally, the death of Beatrice, Dante's mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice's final triunph and apotheosis, and, in the last chapter, Dante's determination to write at some later time about Beatrice, "that which has never been written of any woman."

Yet, with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose, the Vita Nuova is strangely impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality. Names are rarely used...Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante's "best friend," Dante's sister is referred to as "she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood." On the one hand, Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other, he seem to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which Dante arranged poems written over a ten-year period and the generality of his poetic language are indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of the local poets.

The Italian of the Vita Nuova is Dante's own gorgeous Tuscan dialect, a limpid, ethereal and luminous Italian that seems as though it could have been written yesterday. In chapter XXX of the Vita Nuova, Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. In fact, Dante dedicated the Vita Nuova to Cavalcanti--to his best friend (primo amico).

Anyone who can, should definitely read this beautiful book in its original Italian, but those who cannot can still enjoy the beauty of Dante in a good translation. The book isn't as difficult or intimidating as La Divina Commedia and it makes a beautiful introduction to those who love Dante but just want to enjoy a little less of him in the beginning.

It's hard not to assign 5 stars to this early work of the author of the Divine Comedy. In any serious Dante course, a professor will usually pick the Vita Nuovo as an introduction to Dante's work. The work is not at all intimidating -- rather, it's quite accessible to the modern reader. Dante, in his youth, writes a series of love tributes to Beatrice, his ultimate guide in the Divine Comedy. Anyone who is contemplating reading the Divine Comedy should start here and read this first as mandatory background to the Commedia. Dante rules!

Pat Marsh makes an admirable attempt at dispelling the myths about Dante Gabriel Rossetti's legendary wife. By examining different accounts of Siddal and comparing them to what we know is the truth, she attempts to create a kind of biography. That being said, I'm not convinced that there is enough material to warrant a whole book. Most of what we know about Siddal is a mystery. The book unfortunately reads like another book about the Pre-Raphaelite art movement. Nevertheless, if you're interested in the Pre-Raphaelites, this is worth reading.

Willowwood, by Elizabeth Savage, is one of those curious fiction-biographies that is the literary equivalent of yellow journalism. In this genre, a writer may take a real-life person -- preferably dead -- and rewrite their life, the content's reliability limited only by the whim and erudition of the editor/publisher who agrees to print it. Not that biographical-fiction doesn't have its place: In the right hands it can more deeply develop a biography, perhaps breaking new ground by the extrapolation and probing of known facts from a new perspective. Willowwood, however, does not belong to that exception.

The characters involved in the novel are two quiet legends of the Victorian era, poet/painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his model/colleague/wife, Elizabeth Siddall. When one thinks of the passionate-artist stereotype, one dredges up Rossetti. A Romantic immersed in the philosophy and mystic-worldview of the Renaissance, he made a religion of Art whose followers included William Morris, Pater, Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. He was a charismatic personality, a dreamer in an era of stark contradiction - the sanctimony and guilt, certainty and doubt, scientific positivism and poetic mysticism of the Victorian Age. Lizzie Siddall became his model. Her frail, pale face, heavy-lidded eyes, and long red hair are featured in some of the most beloved paintings from that era. The two youths became lovers at some point, and Willowwodd dramatically fabricates their lives.

What do we know of these lives? The two were naïve, young and 'very much in love' as evidenced in interpretations of Rossetti's poems and drawings. They were also very much of their era - when the average age for marriage was almost thirty for a man. It usually took that long for him to establish the means to support a wife, let alone the remote possibility of owning the fabled carriage, a symbol that one had really 'made it'. In the case of an artist who depends on the whims of the public, establishment took longer to arrive, often losing its way and sometimes getting lost altogether. These things along with the grim plight of agricultural workers who saw their family's stability and livelihood disappear with the railroads - might explain why there were more prostitutes in London in the middle of the 19th Century than at any time before or since.

I don't think these dynamics need much explaining. Victorians, for all the mythological balderdash of their prudishness, did have sex, both in and out of marriage. When this occurred in the decade of the Rossetti courtship can only be inferred; there is no information, no proof in the thousands of letters or volumes of studies, no pregnancy before marriage in this time when information about birth-control was suppressed or non-existent. Of course, the very act of becoming an artist's model compromised a girl's reputation in the eyes of the truly gentile...

What I'm getting at, is that Siddall's predicament in becoming a 'mistress' (of any dimension) and Rossetti's not coming up with 'the ring' were not terribly unusual situations in the stream of human events. Add to this the chronic illness (TB? Anorexia? Some easily missed organic disease? The favorite Victorian catch-all, 'nervousness'?) suffered by Siddall, her medically prescribed (and not so uncommon) addiction to laudanum, and the high incidence of maternal/infant mortality, and one might reasonably understand the cold feet on the way to the altar. Her obsession with morbid themes (evidenced in her poems), her depression, her difficulty in dealing with the burden of her own artistic gifts, the general discrimination against women in general, cannot all be laid at Rossetti's feet. Yet, Willowwood does this.

The high drama of this story is that they did marry and two years later, after two miscarriages - one into the eight month when she carried a dead fetus for at least two weeks - Lizzie took an overdose of laudanum and killed herself. There is no doubt of Rossetti's grief. He buried his only manuscript of poems with her and seven years later thought better of it and quietly had the poems retrieved. How perfectly Gothic... The stuff of myths, and many have been made of this. Willowwood continues in this tradition, drawing on discredited and unreliable sources to embellish the tale with what are unfortunately lies. The author re-hashes the misinformation and vicious fabrications drawn from Violet Hunt's 'Wife of Rossetti', written in the 1920's. In the New York Times in the 1930's, Violet was publicly taken to task for her mistruth, which she admitted. Hunt tossed it off, saying that it made 'a good story'.

I don't intend to refute blow by blow in this review the lack of substance in Willowwood. That has already been done in the many well-researched books written by thoughtful people who have devoted their careers to serious study. The problem is that books such as Savage's and Hunt's are still drawn from for information by those who don't consult primary sources. These books may entertain as they tell a stirring fiction. So do the tabloids. Historical fiction IS fiction and, like Eden's snake, you should know what it is when you pick it up. When you read and purchase printed works, please take them to task. Ask yourself if you would want your life to be told to the future world in this guise.