s and light” against a new barbarian invasion.All the Pre-Raphaelite artists and Rossetti was himself a painter took their subjects from an imaginative vision of the Middle Ages, which Morris, an ardent socialist reformer, compared favorably with the modern industrial civilization. Of this group, however, only Christina Rossetti and Swinburne made any lasting contribution to the art of English verse. Christina Rossetti was the finest religious poet to appear in England since the 17th century. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866), a succession of wild, erotic dithyrambs, offended conventional piety with its outspoken sensuality and atheism.The most original poet of the late Victorian period, the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins remained almost completely unknown until the second decade of the 20th century. He broke with the traditions of the past both in his vocabulary and in his peculiar rhythmic methods. Like a modern poet he sought to rarify and condense rather than diffuse and explicate his meaning. Although a deeply religious man, he was always tormented by doubt, and the background of many of his poems is "the Dark Night of the Soul."French literature was now exerting an important influence upon English literary circles. Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons were both followers of the "pote maudit" Paul Verlaine. Oscar Wilde, who was almost as much at home in Paris as in London, preached the gospel of aestheticism, which he had absorbed from Walter Pater. Of Wilde's fashionable comedies, the most brilliant was The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)....
