Cloth binding. Black lettering with gilt title on front cover.

Woolner was also a poet of some reputation in his day. His early poem My Beautiful Lady is a Pre-Raphaelite work, emphasising intense unresolved moments of feeling. He later expanded it into a full-length work modelled on Tennyson’s narrative poetry. According to William Michael Rossetti, Coventry Patmore “praised Woolner’s poems immensely, saying however that they were sometimes slightly over-passionate, and generally ‘sculpturesque’ in character”. By this, he meant that “each stanza was a separate unit”.

In the 1880s Woolner wrote three long narrative works, Pygmalion, Silenus and Tiresias. These renounce Pre-Raphaelitism in favour of an often-eroticised classicism. The first describes the sculptor Pygmalion’s efforts to create a more realistic form of art. He battles against a group called “The Archaics”. The second describes the love affair between Silenus and the nymph Syrinx. After her death at the hands of Pan, Silenus becomes an obese alcoholic, but acquires prophetic powers. A vision of the goddess Athena restores him to emotional stability. In Tiresias the blind sage recalls his long life; in a visionary pantheism, he demonstrates his power to understand the language of birds and enter into the experiences of all living things and natural forces.

THIS poem is by a sculptor who has carried the realities of Pre-Raphaelite principles into portrait sculpture with success.   The poem is remarkable for its gravity of feeling, its tender touches of beauty, and its oneness.  It shows us that the Poet of Form might have been a Poet in Colour, and the life that has blanched in marble might have bloomed in verse.  The writer has felt for himself, thought for himself, and made out his own music, with here and there a sign of invention in measure and rhythm.  He has an eye alive to external nature, and the voice has the quiet emphasis of one who has been steadied by suffering.  The many loving thoughts and beautiful fancies evidently blossom out of the real facts of life, and ‘My Beautiful Lady’ is the work of a thorough artist.  The writer has strong affinities of nature and taste with those early Italian poets translated so affectionately by Mr. Rossetti; and at times his quaintness of manner may raise a smile, but we do not feel it to be an affectation, nor will it be objected to by any reader who is one of the initiated in the experience of loving and losing, and who knows that genuine grief will have its freaks of fancy and quaintness of expression.  The poem was commenced years ago in the Pre-Raphaelite periodical called The Germ.  The seed there dropped has here expanded into an acceptable flower, which, though springing from a grave, has fed on sunshine and dew and taken healthy bloom from the open air.

The story, if story it can be called, is told, or indicated, by the lover of the “Beautiful Lady,” in various measures, which change according to the changing theme.

Woolner was a close friend of a number of writers of the day, notably Thomas Carlyle and Alfred Tennyson. He provided the latter with the scenario for his poem “Enoch Arden”.

He also corresponded with Charles Darwin, who named part of the human ear the ‘Woolnerian Tip’ after a feature in Woolner’s sculpture Puck. Woolner had discussed the feature when Darwin had been sitting to him for a portrait. Darwin later sought his views when preparing his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Thomas Woolner died instantly from a stroke at the age of 66. He was buried in St Mary’s churchyard, Hendon. The kerb around his grave has a sculptor’s mallet and tools carved into it. Buried within St Mary’s Church itself is Sir Stamford Raffles, whose statue he sculpted. His wife Alice died in 1912. Their son, Hugh, travelled back to his home in New York from her funeral on the RMS Titanic. He survived the sinking of the ship.

Thomas Woolner RA (17 December 1825 – 7 October 1892) was an English sculptor and poet who was one of the founder-members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was the only sculptor among the original members.

After participating in the foundation of the PRB, Woolner emigrated for a period to Australia. He returned to Britain to have a successful career as a sculptor, creating many important public works as well as memorials, tomb sculptures and narrative reliefs. He corresponded with many notable men of the day and also had some success as a poet and as an art dealer.