On January 23, 1855, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to his friend William Allingham with regard to illustrations for a new volume of Alfred Tennyson’s poems, explaining he would pick those verses “where one can allegorize on one’s own hook on the subject of the poem, without killing for oneself and every one a distinct idea of the poet’s” (George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854–1870, London: T. Fisher Unwin,...