Religious Imaginaries by Dieleman Karen;

Author:Dieleman, Karen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Aesthetics and Structure

The religious-aesthetic features of Verses include its material appearance and internal structures. Rossetti’s attention to physical space as an important part of the total religious experience is first of all evident in the material concerns of the book Verses, the original edition of which manifests a strong visual-verbal aesthetic not evident in the modern Crump edition, with its focus on text. While certainly the actual production of the book lay in the publisher’s hands, not in the poet’s, Rossetti was fully attuned to its physical appearance and effects (LCR, 4:328, 343). Moreover, she had the precedents of her prose volumes to assure her of her religious publisher’s meticulous attention to appearance. The 1893 edition presents a black exterior with relatively small gold lettering and no additional adornment. Inside, red lines frame the pages into four generous margins and a rectangular room in which the poems are centrally set, each corner of this room being thus marked by a red cross where the lines intersect. At the top of each page, the red line is doubled, with the sectional title printed within the space thus created. Each section also receives its own entrance page, its title centered within the red-ruled room. Each poem begins with an elaborately styled drop letter (one of the few features already modified in the 1896 edition), and a printer’s stock mark separates all poems. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra observes that some of these features were standard to works published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), the publisher for Verses, but she also argues persuasively for Rossetti’s lifelong interest in joining image with text, even when the two are not a literal match: “‘To illustrate’ retained, for both Christina and Dante Gabriel, its primary etymological meaning of ‘to light up’ or ‘to illuminate’ a text rather than ‘to reflect’ it as in popular contemporary usage.”20 Although Verses is not illustrated in the conventional sense, its visual features certainly illuminate its religious nature.

True, such spaces and fonts also obtained in secular poetry. Jay A. Gertzman observes that for businessmen attuned to the upwardly mobile middle class’s desire to appear as refined readers, “Fashionable book design . . . was a business necessity as well as an aesthetic pleasure.” An 1887 publication of Robert Herrick’s poems, for instance, has each poem beginning on a separate red-bordered page with generous remains of white space; and Chapman notes that Victorian sonnet anthologies typically emphasize the sonnet’s aesthetic value by situating each sonnet on a red-bordered page of its own.21 However, as the Herrick example most clearly demonstrates, publishers usually compensated for the high costs of such book production by selecting only poets of earlier eras for these aesthetic editions—“a Chaucer, a Milton, or a Herrick,” who “presented no problems of copyright.”22 In this way, aesthetically pleasing collections of poetry (including sonnet anthologies) could be priced affordably. Contemporary poets, by contrast, could seldom find publishers able to produce a book having both high aesthetic appeal and a reasonable price—unless

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