These sonnets and songs were written individually between 1847 and 1870 (when the work was published in the 1870 ). Most of the sonnets were written between 1868-1870, while most of the songs belong to much earlier dates. The conception of a loosely related sequence of lyric pieces first grew upon his mind, apparently, in early 1869, when he decided to publish sixteen of the sonnets together in the in March 1869 under the title .

DGR's comment to William Bell Scott on his composition habits, in particular for sonnets, is important: “I hardly ever do produce a sonnet except on some basis of special momentary emotion; but I think there is another class admissable also—and that is the only other I practise, viz. the class depending on a line or two clearly given you, you know not whence, and calling up a sequence of ideas. This also is a just raison d'etre for a sonnet, and such are all mine when they do not in some sense belong to the ‘occasional’ class” (see letter of 25 August 1871, Fredeman, Correspondence, 71. 129 ).

The work of both revising the individual pieces of the sequence, and re-arranging or reorganizing their order, was largely carried out in the elaborate process DGR followed from the summer of 1869 until April 1870, as he prepared to publish his 1870 volume of . Some revisions to early individual works were of course executed, and DGR clearly reworked with care the sixteen poems he published in the in March 1869. The latter process took place between mid-December 1868, when he wrote the sonnets, and March 1869, when the initial sequence appeared.

Between March and August 1869 DGR worked out a new sequence of thirty-three sonnets (for the Penkill Proofs), and in this new form he began redistributing the sonnets into a new order. With the exception of , which remains at the head of the thirty-three sonnet sequence, this is the order, substantially if not exactly, that they will have through all the many subsequent transformations of the work as a whole.

By the time the A Proofs are pulled less than a month after the Penkill Proofs, the sequence has undergone a drastic change and augmentation. There are now forty-five poems comprising the sequence, and the order is in three distinct parts: twelve sonnets (which would make up the core of the second part of the received sequence); fourteen songs and short poems (reflecting the group that would evolve into the section of the 1870's ”); and nineteen sonnets (substantially equivalent to what would eventually evolve into the first part of the sonnet sequence). The A2 Proofs, pulled a few days later, follow the general order of the A Proofs, but six new sonnets are added to the sequence; and the same process is followed in the First and Second Trial Books, the first printed in early October, the second through late November.

Between the Second Trial Book and the proofs for the first edition—that is, in December, January, and February of 1869-70—the materials for sequence underwent a further drastic reworking, and in fact achieved in substantial part the form that they took in the 1870 volume: the were grouped at the end of the sonnets, and the two groups of the latter were reversed with respect to each other from the general order followed in the earlier proof states. This final, crucial restructuring came around 26 February 1870, just before the proofs for the first edition were set on 1 March, as DGR's letter to Swinburne shows (see letter of 26 February 1870, Fredeman, Correspondence, 70. 35 ).

When DGR showed his brother the sonnets on 18 December 1868, just after he had composed them, WMR saw immediately that they were “about the finest thing that he has done”; and when the group of sixteen sonnets appeared in the in March 1869, Browning sent a fulsome letter to DGR about his “precious. precious jewels” of poetry (see WMR, , 339, 430 ). These two early reactions define the terms of enthusiastic response that DGR's project would receive from the beginning, and for many years afterwards. Like the 1870 , in which the sequence was centrally placed, the work provoked strong hostile criticism as well, a set of reactions epitomized in Robert Buchanan's famous attack (, October 1871).

Because this poetic sequence formed such an integral (indeed, such a central) place in the 1870 , its iconographical characteristics are always insistent. This situation develops because so much of the 1870 volume is conceived in terms of DGR's double work of art, on one hand, and because his poetry is so pictorial in its methods on the other. Certain texts in the sequence bring the iconographical issues into special prominence, such as , , , and . But the entire approach is fundamentally imagistic and pictorial.

Although one sonnet from the 1870 sequence was separately published (, in 1863), the first appearance in print of any part of the larger work was in March 1869, when DGR published in the . This sequence included twelve new sonnets (written between mid-December 1868 and March 1869) and four earlier ones (written in 1853, 1854, and 1862). Around this core of sonnets DGR gradually constructed the sequence that appeared in the 1870 . The form of the latter was only realized after DGR worked and reworked his materials in the proof texts he had printed between the late summer of 1869 and April 1870.

After the appearance of this 1870 text of his most famous literary work DGR continued to write sonnets on related themes. He composed a large group of these in 1871 and gathered them, along with a few he had written earlier, into an integral sequence that he presented to Jane Morris. These are the so-called Kelmscott Love Sonnets copied into the manuscript book now in the Bodleian Library (but not printed as such until the twentieth-century). In 1880-1881 DGR recast the whole corpus of this work into a new form, the text of that appeared in the .

The most important literary work standing behind DGR's project is unquestionably Dante's ; but the entirety of the stil novisti movement, which DGR sought to define in his great work of translation (1862), is central to what DGR is concerned with: the relation of poetry and art to ideal love. Petrarch's , which explores this relation in more aesthetic terms, is also an important precursor. But Dante and Dante's Beatrice are central, not least because DGR (unlike Petrarch) insists upon the mortal reality of his love ideal (whereas Petrarch's extreme wit regularly turns the reading and interpretation of his texts into more aesthetic directions). In DGR's terms, of course, the insistence on Beatrice's historicality takes a distinctive and non-Dantean form because DGR's love-ideal is always conceived in erotic terms.

But Petrarch's influence on the sequence is no less decisive, if sometimes it is less obvious. DGR underplayed the influence, but it is Petrarch (and Cavalcanti) who foreground the aesthetic and erotic stakes involved. The 1881 division of the sonnets into two parts clearly reflects the similar division of the into two parts. of 1870 does not have such a clearly demarcated division of the sonnets; on the other hand, it also falls into two parts, the first consisting of the sonnets, the second of the related songs. The Petrarchan character of DGR's work in this instance is doubly apparent, for of course the consists of various metrical forms. In Petrarch, however, they are mixed together. Finally, if DGR's work revises the idealizing dynamic of Dante's work, he nonetheless imagines his quest as following in Dante's path. His relation to Petrarch is much more critical. Petrarch's is structured as a penetential process through which he frees himself from his enslavement to love. This passage he represents as a movement from an aesthetic involvement with beauty—his life as an artist—to a philosophic involvement with moral truth. In a sense, DGR's work functions as a foundational rejection of Petrarch's artistic posture. aspires to an artistic practise in which erotic and ideal love are given equal value. More than that, it aspires to demonstrate that this goal can only be imaginatively—that is to say, artistically—achieved.

Certain motifs in DGR's sonnet sequence betray Petrarch's particular influence—most notably the running treatment of the grove and its related imagery. See Petrarch's nos. CXLII and CLXXXI in particular (but also XXIII, LX, LXXI, and CVII). The motif in DGR's sequence is introduced early, in the opening sonnet of the 1870 sequence, .

English sonnet sequences that derive from Dante's work, from Petrarch, and from the whole tradition of Courtly Love— Sidney's, Spenser's, and Shakespeare's in particular—are also clear influences on DGR's project.

Also important to realize is the elegiac character of DGR's approach to his work. Tennyson's has been aptly seen as an influence on DGR's work for this reason. One wants only to add that the loose structure of Tennyson's elegiac sequence—its organization by lyric units and small groups of such units—has much in common with the formal procedures that operate in DGR's work.

Although DGR tried to prevent autobiographical readings of this work, and while various critics have (rightly) emphasized the need to approach it in more formal and aesthetic ways, the work is grounded from the start in deeply personal experiences. In succint terms: the work is an exploration and meditation on DGR's life as an artist whose central preoccupation, in his own view, has been the pursuit of love as an erotic and mortal ideal. This pursuit, according to the work's own representation of the matter, involved various apparitions of ideal love, two in particular: Elizabeth Siddal, the poet's wife (who died in 1862), and Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris. At the heart of the poem are two losses: the death of his wife, and the unaccomplished (and perhaps even unconsummated) love of DGR for Jane Morris, a passion which grew upon him only after he had committed himself to Elizabeth. Hall Caine gives a succinct summary of the relationships (but without names) in (New York, 1909), 195-197 .

The biographical focus of the work was established very early. The sixteen sonnets published as a group in 1868 are crucially involved with four early sonnets DGR recovered in order to supply his new sonnets with a structural focus. Indeed, the sequence pivots around the sonnet , which was written in 1862 and which centers in the memory of Elizabeth Siddal. DGR recovered three other important early works (, , and . These three were written in 1853-54, but the apparent reference of the first of the three to Jane Burden led WMR to date the sonnet (mistakenly) 1857 (see WMR, DGR as Designer and Writer, 293 ). His error betrays his awareness of the dramatic significance of the sonnet in the sequence at large.

Baker, (1970), 1-14 Baum, ed. (1928). Bentley, (1977), 279-283 Boos, , (1976) 18-101 Bowra, (1949) 197-220 Doughty, 2nd. edition (1960) 379-91 Fredeman, (1965), 298-341 Giles, (May 1982), 100-119 Howard, , (1972) 164-174 Hume, (1969), 282-295 Lewis ed., (2007) Mitchell, (1985),76-87 Oliviero, (1933) Riede, , (1992) 118-142 Robillard, (1962), 5-9 Sharp, , (1882) 406-432 Talon, (1966) Tisdel, ” (1917), 257-276 Wagner, JPRS NS 4 (1995): 74-84. Wallerstein, (1927), 492-504 Weliver, (2005), 194-212 WMR, , 179-262