![]() When Goblin Market went out of copyright in the early twentieth century, it became a popular reprint in the juvenile market, often featuring colored pictures of the girls and the goblins in lush outdoor settings. The power of its visual images, and the two wood-engraved designs by Dante Gabriel Rossetti that accompanied the poem’s first publication, evoked numerous artistic interpretations, from stained glass windows to gift books. ![]() Its sensuous image patterns, religious images, unique prosodic qualities, and social implications inspired school study and recitation as well as musical settings and performances. By late in the nineteenth century, readers, reviewers, illustrators, and composers began to focus on the poem’s powerful aesthetic qualities. Early on it was often viewed as a fairy tale or an allegory (sometimes compared to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner). Critics assigned the poem to various generic categories, the number and variety of which increased over the following decades and throughout the twentieth century. ![]() Almost immediately, this narrative poem was recognized as a significant achievement, despite the ambiguity of its genre and meaning. ![]() Goblin Market appeared as the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first commercially published volume of verse, Goblin Market and Other Poems (Macmillan 1862). ![]()
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