Excerpt from The House of Life: A Sonnet-Sequence, With an Introduction

If ever a poet produced a "life-work," Dante Rossetti did so in writing The House of Life. It is a life-work in the sense that the composition of it covers the whole of his adult career, from about 1847 to 1881, or from the age of nineteen to that of fifty-two: he died before the age of fifty-four. And again in the sense that it embodies salient incidents and emotions in his own life; for there are very few of the sonnets which are not strictly personal, and not one through which his individual feelings and views do not transpire. The very title, The House of Life, indicates as much. This title (which seems to be based on a sort of astrological suggestion) should not indeed be construed as meaning "The House of My Life" - rather, "The House of Human Life," abstract and concrete: but, as Rossetti knew a good deal more about his own life than about that of other people, so he starts from facts in his own life, and allows them to represent, as far as the application will extend, facts in the general life of man.

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