When English restraint meets up with Italian ardor the outcome is comical. The sudden discovery of one’s own sensuality – the perennial theme in such encounters between the north and the south – can be as exhilarating as a first kiss, unforgettable for its hesitant clumsiness but no less amusing to observers, even if endearingly so. The lure of Italy is irresistible to the literary. Chaucer fell under the spell of Boccaccio, and the effect was to soften and to deepen his perception of human waywardness. Can we imagine the Elizabethans – and I include Shakespeare – without the huge impact of Petrarch (who not only dominated poetic conventions but modes of feeling for centuries)? Even stern Milton succumbed, learning Italian well enough to compose sonnets in it.

We Americans are just as susceptible. The yearning heiresses of Henry James’s novels are seduced as much by Italy itself as by the mercenary aristocrats who prey on them. In “The Portrait of a Lady,” Isabel Archer is betrayed precisely where she is most vulnerable, in that newly awakened sexual self that Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle, her betrayers, have helped her to discover – with the connivance of Italy. Of course, the Germans outdo us all. And they have a word for it, too. Someone who wallows in freshly surprised sensuality is a “pleasure-mollusk” (“Lustmolch”). Here, as elsewhere, Goethe, the Uber-Oyster, reigns supreme, bragging (in his “Roman Elegies”) of how he tapped out his hexameters on his mistress’s back while they made love.

But the encounter between Italy and her more northerly admirers, while often combustible, isn’t always so blatant. Nor is it invariably one-sided. I’ve been reading the remarkable poems of Christina Rossetti, and the way in which she poured the most intense, and often searing, feeling into tight English verse forms, leaves me struck with puzzled admiration. Puzzled because, despite surface impressions, she writes like no one else in English poetry; admiring because she impresses me as one of the greatest 19th-century poets. (And I don’t just mean “women poets,” a category as dumb as it’s demeaning.)

Christina Rossetti thrived on extremes. Brought up in a bilingual household in London, she infused English poetry with a rare amalgam of the austere and the fervent. She lived like a nun but consorted with all the guiding spirits of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: not only her brilliant and unstable brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a gifted painter and poet of erratic if startling gifts, but also the painters William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais and even Lewis Carroll (who photographed her in a family group in 1863). She was in the world but not of it, and her poetry bears the impress of this vivid paradox.

A contemporary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning – and unabashedly competitive with her – Rossetti struck a new note. Though she was fond of Victorian locutions and mannerisms (her poetry abounds in archaicizing turns of phrase), she possessed a verbal music no less persuasive than Tennyson’s (and, after his death in 1892, became a leading candidate for the Poet Laureateship). In reading her poems, you must look beneath the fastidious phrasing to grasp the full force of the intensity that animates it. There is no one like her in the language, with the possible exception of Emily Dickinson, another savvy but relentless marauder of the spirit.

The sheer bulk of Rossetti’s work astonishes. I’m reading her in the Penguin edition, lovingly assembled by R. W. Crump and superbly annotated by Betty S. Flowers, and the thick volume weighs in at 1,221 pages (though it costs only $17) – even by Victorian standards, a stupendous output. What astonishes even more is the suave accomplishment evident on every page; some poems, inevitably, are slight or misjudged but not one is negligible.

Her first great poem, and my own favorite, is “Goblin Market,” which appeared in 1862. This narrative fable, with its ingenious and witty patterns of rhyme, is at once spooky and moving, a verse parable that takes our simplest but deepest longings as its poisoned subject. Leave aside the various zany readings of this poem – critics have found everything from vampirism to anorexia in its lines – and revel in its sheer voluptuousness. It is about the temptation of life itself, the ache we all feel before the inexhaustible pull of the world, its taste and savor, its lulling appeal to the senses, here epitomized in the succulent fruits of the field:

Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bulaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.

It is the goblins speaking, monstrous tempters in disfigured form; in their ugliness and freaky misshapenness, they offer all the pleasures the senses can afford:

One had a cat’s face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat’s pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry

Two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, are tempted by the goblins’ cries. Lizzie, prim and circumspect, resists but Laura gives in to her cravings and is drugged by the luscious fruits the haggling goblins proffer. Like Coleridge in “Kubla Khan,” she “on honey-dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of Paradise,” and she can never afterwards be satisfied with the humdrum rituals of daily life. Lizzie doesn’t taste the fruit but suffers the jeering goblins to buffet her and smear her with their wares. She returns to save her sister, commanding her to “hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,” and Laura is healed.

The poem is laden with sensual imperatives. The goblins speak only in cajoling commands. The poem urges us to taste and taste again. But Rossetti herself, like Lizzie, couldn’t taste; she abjured the senses even as they overwhelmed her. Many of her most powerful poems address the longing for death, as though only death could offer some absolute satiation. In a late unpublished poem she put it with characteristic bleakness:

Surely to suffer is more than to do:
To do is quickly done; to suffer is
Longer and fuller of heart-sicknesses:
Each day’s experience testifies of this.

Gone are the mannerisms, the cloaked poses; bald statement has supplanted them. Early on, she had written of herself, “all on the threshold, yet all short of life.” This is one of the great, if minor, themes of modern English poetry, here given an Italianate twist and spin. Surely it’s no coincidence that Philip Larkin, one of her admirers, kept her poems all his life alongside Thomas Hardy’s on his writing desk. Like him she is the great poet of the unappeasable.