SOURCE: Boos, Florence Saunders. “Style In ‘The House of Life’.” In The Poetry of Dante G. Rossetti: A Critical Reading and Source Study, pp. 88-91. Hague: Mouton & Co. B. V., Publishers, 1976.

In the following excerpt, Boos discusses love and sexuality in Rossetti's The House of Life.

“Love” in Rosetti, as in almost all nineteenth-century poets, is a metaphor for all that is best and most concentrated in life—memory, sensuousness, idealism, the aesthetic and the intense. Whereas in Keats' poetry the knowledge of warm human love seemed of greater significance even than death, and to Peter and certain Decadents aesthetic experience or love was the self-expression of a private identity perpetually verging on extinction, Rossetti offered a middle view; private experience must involve some other human being or be a response, even if purely subjective and internal, to a minimally social relation. Yet he considered the possibility that...