Introduction: The Poetess Tradition

The transatlantic poetess is now studied in British (1773-1839), American (1770-1865), and Transatlantic (1770-1860) literature courses. This introduction is designed to help plan courses that focus either wholly or in part on the poetess and for doing research on a poetess or the poetess tradition. To offer a way of approaching poetry written by the poetess, I think aloud, publicicly, about several very specific issues: this introduction a) examines why the title “poetess” has come to be a derogatory term, b) discusses the relation of this “minor” poetry to the canon, c) explains the value of studying sentimental literature to those who are interested in postmodernism and transatlanticism, and then, finaly, d) proposes a preliminary sketch of the “poetics” of poetess poetry. I first used the word “poetess” in graduate school, talking to a feminist friend about the woman poet Mary Leapor. My friend immediately corrected me: the word “poetess,” she told me, like the word “stewardess,” is demeaning. But sometimes it is difficult to tell the extent to which feminists participate in rather than critique the devaluation of women writers who, after all, chose to designate themselves as “poetesses.” For instance, Anne Mellor, who has done so much to redeem the reputations of those British Romantic-era women writers, has most recently contrasted the “subtle” subversiveness of poetry written by the poetess to the directly political “female poet” of the Romantic period, devaluing the term “poetess” but this time on feminist grounds (see Mellor, “Female Poet”). Annie Finch – a self-proclaimed “Postmodern poetess” (“Confessions”) whose essay on Phillis Wheatley appears here – forwards messages to me from her email discussion list for poets whenever someone flames someone else for using the term; it happens frequently. Looking at the word “poetess” in the O.E.D., one can see that, except when applied to Sappho, it was demeaning right at the outset, when first used by Tindale in 1530. Aphra Behn all but equates the term with “prostitute.” The word is derogatory throughout the eighteenth century, even after the publication and re-publication of Poems by Eminent Ladies, the second British print anthology of women’s writing that appeared 1755 and reprinted in 1773 and 1780. Campaigning (and perhaps for personal reasons) to prove the female mind as capacious as the male, the editors George Colman and Bonnell Thornton do not use the term “poetess”: anything BUT; they talk about poetry by “the Fair Sex,” “the poetical attempts of females,” “works [by] . . . ingenious females” and “Learned Ladies.” The female writers collected in Poems by Eminent Ladies are only retrospectively and hence anachronistically called “poetesses,” famously by William Wordsworth who is reported by his nephew and memoirist Christopher Wordsworth to have said, “British poetesses make but a poor figure in the ‘Poems by Eminent Ladies’” (ii.228). At the moment that Colman and Thornton publish their collection to offer “a standing proof that great abilities are not confined to the men, and that genius often glows with equal warmth, and perhaps with more delicacy, in the breast of a female” – at that moment in 1755, perhaps, the word “poetess” is as derogatory as it seems in a private letter of 1748 quoted by the O.E.D. Though clearly diminutive in Coleridge’s poem “To Matilda Bentham,” the term is – temporarily, at least – rendered respectable by Alexander Dyce in his Specimens of British Poetesses first published in 1825; the poor Scottish Poetess Susannah Hawkins applies it approvingly to herself in 1829 (v). The laudatory sense of the word, Aimée Boutin shows in her essay included in this special issue makes it across the …