The Pre-Raphaelites‪.‬

I will begin this year's review with three brief general studies of Pre-Raphaelitism. David Riede's overview of "The Pre-Raphaelite School," in the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, allots most of his sixteen pages to discussion of early works, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Art Catholic poems, Christina Rossetti's verses for The Germ, Morris' "The Defence of Guenevere," and finally Swinburne's "Laus Veneris," in which Riede finds a common programmatic effort to indite "poetry about poetry [or] poetic 'mystery' in aesthetic beauty" (p. 311). He also considers Swinburne "arguably the greatest poet among the Pre-Raphaelites" (p. 317), and interprets the longer-term reactions to Robert Buchanan's attack in The Fleshly School of Poetry as an unequivocal "victory for aestheticism and ... the most important legacy of Pre-Raphaelitism, a widespread acceptance of artistic freedom as a counter-cultural challenge to cultural orthodoxy" (p, 319).