SOURCE: "'The Blessed Damozel'": A Young Man's Fantasy," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 20, Nos. 3-4, Autumn-Winter, 1982, pp. 31-43.

In the following essay, Bentley interprets "The Blessed Damozel" as a poem celebratory of "medieval-Catholic awareness."

Early in 1848, Dante Gabriel Rossetti submitted several poems to Leigh Hunt for approval. Evidently the young poet did not find the older man's comments, though obviously "flattering,"¹ particularly perspicacious. In a letter to his aunt Charlotte Polidori written a short time later he says, "Where Hunt, in his kind letter, speaks of my 'Dantesque heavens,' he refers to one or two of the poems the scenes of which are laid in the celestial regions, and which are written in a kind of Gothic manner which I suppose he is pleased to think belongs to the school of Dante" (Letters, 34). There can be little doubt that one of the poems to which Hunt was referring...