The term “Pre‐Raphaelitism” applies most immediately to the joint projects of poets and artists who came together in two successive phases: as the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848 to c. 1854), which included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and William Michael Rossetti and was joined by Christina Rossetti as contributing poet; and, a few years later (1856 to c. 1865), as a second grouping around Rossetti, which included William Morris, Edward Burne‐Jones, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. In both phases, young men early in their careers fired each other to strike out on new and distinctive paths; both groups sought to disrupt present conventions and to think poetry and visual arts freshly, drawing inspiration from work in other languages, cultures, and media and from an historical moment distant from their own: the period before Raphael (that is, before the high Renaissance). In both groups, the most intense periods of collaboration were brief, yet extraordinarily productive for poetry as well as for the visual arts, creating a form of modern medievalism that looked ahead to the modernisms of the next century.