SOURCE: Lourie, Margaret A. “The Embodiment of Dreams: William Morris' ‘Blue Closet’ Group.” Victorian Poetry 15, no. 3 (fall 1977): 193-206.

In the following essay, Lourie examines the seven Morris poems that make up the “The Blue Closet” group, maintaining that by studying these poems “we will perhaps have learned something essential about the Pre-Raphaelite contribution to English poetry.”

Pre-Raphaelite poetry, that influential resurgence of Romanticism in mid-nineteenth-century England, has been accurately perceived from the beginning to be such stuff as dreams are made on. When in 1858 William Morris published the first Pre-Raphaelite volume under the title The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, it was greeted by the reviewer for the Athenaeum with a damaging comparison to Tennyson: “That strange dream [‘The Lady of Shalott’], which, however beautiful, quaint, and touching it be, quivers on the furthest verge of Dream-land to which sane Fancy can penetrate, has been ‘the point...