The Pre-Raphaelites were radicals; they took the mid-nineteenth century by storm with their paintings and poems that both harked back to the Middle Ages for inspiration and also tried to be unflinchingly honest in their truth to Nature’. As Dr Ruth Robbins points out in her Introduction, they shocked Victorian audiences with their open expressions of emotion and sensuality. They created a new and extraordinary aesthetic, and were of central importance to the emerging Arts and Crafts Movement. Poems by William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Algernon Swinburne.