Like Pope, when Rossetti came into his own as a writer he was quite young, in his teens; and although some of the work from his later years is arguably stronger or more profound, the prose and poetry composed between his fifteenth and twentieth years is already mature, in full possession of his distinctive poetic resources. Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Poe, and Browning: these are the English-language writers who stand behind his work and lead him to that "originality" Pater recognized. Almost equally important, of course, were the writers Rossetti himself named "Dante and His Circle." Indeed, Dante is probably Rossetti's single most important precursor, partly because he supplied Rossetti with his central myth of the poet's life, and partly because, in seeking to reconstruct that myth through his translations, Rossetti was led to fashion an English style that has been materially marked by Italian linguistic and poetical resources.

The first two passages, which open the second and third stanzas of Rossetti's translation of Dante's famous canzone "Gli occhi, dolenti," fashion remarkable English equivalents for Dante's hendecasyllabic rhythms. The third passage is his translation of the opening of Cavalcanti's sonnet "Chi e questa, che ven" and it nicely exhibits a number of stylistic features that Rossetti will incorporate into his English verse. Notable are the synaesthesia, the sharp rendering of abstractions, the resort to sequences of brief words that subtly highlight key longer words ("coming", "tremulous", "himself", "infinite"), the careful rhythmic arrangement of the latter, and, finally, the slightly off-rhymes. The rhyming resources of Italian will draw Rossetti to develop many unusual rhymes and rhyming rhythms, some of them shocking, even outrageous.