Poetry

William Bell Scott had a significant influence on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of the pre-Raphaelite school of poetry.

Early in his career, Scott wrote in a Spasmodic style similar to that of Philip James Bailey’s Festus (1839). Scott’s Spasmodic works include Hades; or, The Transit: and The Progress of Mind: Two Poems (1838) and The Year of the World (1846).

Scott’s early poems that were most influential for the pre-Raphaelite style were “Rosabell” and “A Dream of Love,” published in 1838 in Leigh Hunt’s Monthly Repository, and “Morning Sleep” and “Sonnet: Early Aspirations,” published in 1850 in the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ.

At the height of his career, Scott published two volumes of poetry, Poems (1854) and Poems (1875). Many of Scott’s poems during this period were in ballad or sonnet form. His best ballads include “Woodstock Maze” (1854) and “The Witch’s Ballad” (1875). Representative sonnets are “Pebbles in the Stream” (1854) and “Below the Old House” (1875).

Scott’s final book of poetry was A Poet’s Harvest Home (1882; expanded edition, 1893). The poems here are written in a much simpler, more direct style.