Introduction
As Fredeman has observed, the poet Ebenezer Jones (1820-1860) was one among “that group of painters and poets worth remembering who were the objects of Rossetti's early enthusiasm”—a group led by William Blake, but that included as well Theodore von Holst, David Scott, Charles Wells, and Ebenezer Jones (
Fredeman,
<hi rend="i">Correspondence</hi>
, 48.3n
). DGR met Jones in 1848 through the writer Robert Calder Campbell (who contributed a sonnet to the February 1850 issue of
<hi rend="i">The Germ</hi>
, 68
).
Jones's had a difficult life and eventually died of consumption. His poems were collected in the 1843 volume
<hi rend="i">Studies of Sensation and Event; Poems</hi>
, a book republished in 1879 in an edition edited by Richard Herne Shepherd. The virtue and the limitation of Jones's work is a function of his relative isolation as a writer. Three of his poems, still remembered, have an especially arresting force: “When the world is burning”; “To the Snow”; and “To Death”. WMR quotes DGR to the effect that “had [‘When the world is burning’] been the writing of Edgar Poe, it would have enjoyed world-wide celebrity” (see
WMR,
<hi rend="i">Memoir</hi>
, 151 n.2
).