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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and
Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and
trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the
poet may blow the music of their many messages.
And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a
reaction against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax
execution of previous poetry and painting, showing itself in the
work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by a far greater
splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than
English imaginative art has shown before. In Rossetti's poetry and
the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision
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