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Rossetti co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with the painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, a group of London art students who wanted to paint with the sharp detail and bright colour of Italian art from before Raphael, rejecting the loose, dark academic style then taught at the Royal Academy. Rossetti was as much a poet as a painter, and for years he kept the two apart, writing verse privately while painting Arthurian and Dantean scenes for patrons.

Around 1850 he met Elizabeth Siddal, a milliner's assistant who became his model, his pupil, and by 1860 his wife. Siddal painted and wrote poetry herself, well enough that the critic John Ruskin gave her an allowance to keep working, but her health was fragile and she had grown dependent on laudanum, an opium tincture. In February 1862 she died of an overdose, not long after a stillbirth. At her funeral Rossetti placed the only manuscript copy of his poems in her coffin, wrapped in her hair, and had it buried with her.

Seven years later, short of money and persuaded by friends that the poems were too good to stay underground, he had Siddal's grave opened at Highgate Cemetery at night and the book retrieved. The paper was damaged and smelled of the grave, but the poems were legible enough to publish, and they appeared in 1870 as Poems by D.G. Rossetti.