Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Little Green Book, and the Dispute with Death.

The most commonly recited anecdote regarding Dante Gabriel Rossetti recalls the incident surrounding the burial of his bound manuscript of poetry in 1862 alongside his wife Elizabeth Siddal. Buried in an act of contrition encouraged by his brother, the manuscript was retrieved from the exhumed coffin at Rossetti's behest in 1869 by his friend Charles Augustus Howell and returned to the poet in a severe state of decay and smelling of disinfectant. Three of the poems recovered would famously form an integral part of the 1870 Poems. This essay situates Rossetti's action in undertaking the exhumation as a trope for the way his poetry consistently revisits and reconfigures conceptualisations of life and death, often with regards to physical and spiritual embodiment. Without seeking to offer ethical justification for Rossetti's actions in retrieving his poems, I will focus rather on the ways in which his poetic vision is dominated by the language of exile and return, of burial and retrieval, and how these twin concerns are manifest in the poems of the little green book. These three long poems, which it appears he was most eager to recover through the distasteful act, are identified collectively as 'the exhumation poems': 'Dante at Verona', 'A Last Confession', and 'Jenny'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]