Raising the Dead: Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting in the spirit world.

Many members of the second generation Pre-Raphaelites practiced various kinds of spiritualism in which the distance between the living and the dead was temptingly close. Rossetti was one of those and his short ‘bogie’ sonnet sequence ‘Willowwood’ has always resisted any complete critical explanation. But if placed in the context of some of his contemporary art works and both are related to his passion for spiritualism then the group takes on a new and curious meaning