An eminent literary biographer and critic shows how poetry enriched the art of two representative English Romantic painters

In Visionary and Dreamer, David Cecil evokes the century of the poet-painter, when painting drew much of its inspiration from imaginative literature. Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), an unworldly visionary, obscure in his lifetime but now a recognized master, and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), the Pre-Raphaelite daydreamer, once revered as a great painter but later admired chiefly for his work in applied art, emerge as artists who turned to their own inner lives to interpret Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats.