Numéro 29-30, february–may 2003 The Transatlantic Poetess Sous la direction de Laura Mandell

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Louise Bogan joked that in a former life she had been “Felicia Hemans.” A lush Romantic and an austere Modernist, Hemans and Bogan appear polar opposites, yet these learned women poets shared a laureate poetics of Love and Fame. Hemans alludes directly to Petrarch’s laureate triumph in “The Magic Glass”; in poetry and prose she portrays the difficult laureateships of Sappho and Tasso. Both Hemans and Bogan seemed laureates to their contemporaries and successors, yet both found laurels an ambiguous donnée, Bogan a “burden” among flowers, Hemans a fiery crown for the likes of “the Bride of the Greek Isle.” Petrarch gained his laurels in a formal triumph at Rome, a scene mandating abjuration and entailing defeat. His I trionfi enacted triumph and its reversals in a sequence mounting from Love to Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. Bogan’s laurels were similarly fugual, a “subtle wreath” combining “the line of feeling” of “sentimental” women’s poetry with “the line of thought” in masculine Metaphysical Modernism. The poems of Bogan and Hemans that most vex critics – Bogan’s life-denying “Henceforth, from the Mind,” Hemans’s fame-abjuring “Corinne at the Capitol” – read differently as Petrarchan triumphs, that is, as abjurations signaling fresh triumphs to come.

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Hemans’s “poetics of expiration” is contrasted to the high Romantic “poetics of effusion,” the former devoted to insubstantiality, the latter to the monumental. Critics from Walter Scott to Kingsley Amis have berated Hemans’s extreme superficiality, but, as Jerome McGann has argued, it can be seen as her bid to imagine substance on the brink of its dissolution. This essay shows, through careful readings of her poems, that though dissolution and death figure in this poetics of expiration, at its heart is a reversal from “emptying out” to “proliferation.” A dying into the moment has a certain life-yield that Hemans calls “holiness.” Reading not only the reception history of Hemans but also Hemans’s reception of high Romantic poets show us that we have misunderstood her aims: attuning ourselves to her praise for the enactment of her highest poetic goals in poetry by others helps us to see them in her works as well.

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Felicia Hemans’s poetry is guided by an aesthetic of acute interestedness, but unlike most sentimental writers, Hemans treats feeling as something with epistemological value. This creates an interesting challenge in “The Image in Lava” since in the poem Hemans takes her sentimental stroll on the seemingly solid ground of natural science. In her rhetorical rendering of the ashen form of a mother and child, which was found during the excavations at Pompeii, Hemans suggests that the mother’s profound feelings yielded a highly romantic phenomenon: artless art. When Hemans rhapsodizes on the indestructible form of mother and child, whose love transcends mundane occurrences like death, her idealizing tendencies reveal an uncanny wisdom. The strange fact is that the forms of the mother and child have defied death. Hemans’s musing suggests an unorthodox theology: the immortal part of the mother and her child is not an interior soul that escaped the body at the moment of decease, but an exterior form that lingers amidst the ashes. By employing the conventions of sentimental literature in her response to a truly startling phenomenon—a human object—she aims to authenticate feelings that have been caricatured as clichés. Sentimental discourse thereby becomes a tool for sounding the depths of feelings and discovering the parameters of humanness.

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In Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s The Improvisatrice, the physical body of the book puns on the female body. The erotics of poetess poetry is anchored in the sensuality of "embellishments," including the elaborate chirographic renditions of the initials “L.E.L.” Landon capitalizes on by eroticizing / embellishing all kinds of writing already in circulation. Moreover, The Improvisatrice enacts a kind of viewing that L.E.L. wants readers to participate in as they read. The poem encourages readers to engage in an "onanistic poesaphilia," to witness and participate in thinly-veiled pornographic scenes of indulgence in poetic sensibility. Landon presumes that being entertained consists in reading about people writing erotically. L.E.L.'s heroines are less passive sentimental victims than the proponents of "safe sex," an eroticism that is both bookish and solitary.

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So what if Letitia Landon had three illegitimate children by William Jerdan? What difference does the discovery of the affair make for our reading of L. E. L.’s poetry? This essay begins to explore these questions with regard to her love poems, many of which culminate in a desire for death even greater than that voiced for the absent beloved. We have been disinclined to believe in the authenticity of the poems’ fatal passions and naturally require more evidence before we can assume that any of their intensity is related to Landon’s feelings for the bibulous Literary Gazette editor. Through examining a number of Landon’s early, sexually daring poems and her relationship with Jerdan at the time of their writing, this essay provides some of that evidence and discusses the part these works likely played in the evolution of this literary and sexual relationship. According to Landon’s theory, genius had to devote its grand soul to an inferior being to experience the torment essential for producing literary works of the highest order. Landon viewed her affair with the editor as a means to a greater end: the poems themselves, including, not incidentally, their publication and promotion.

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Identifying abolitionist poetry as an important site for investigating rhetorical transformations and innovations in late eighteenth century women’s poetry, this essay shows how poetic language generates sympathy. In reading women’s poetry in general, and abolitionist poetry in particular, we too often presume that they worked under the assumption that all readers would identify directly with representations of suffering. While William Cowper, writing before Helen Maria Williams and Ann Yearsley, opens up the problematic that all forms of sympathy might be mere narcissistic self-indulgence, Yearsley and Williams provide a model for and effectively limit such reflexive sympathy. For them, the process of sympathizing with an Other begins with the act of taking him or her into one’s own imaginative “domos.” But by actively embracing this narcissistic process, Williams and Yearsley are able to regulate such domestications of the slave’s pain. Williams controls whose identities merge, ensuring that the reader identifies with reformer rather than slaver. In contrast, Yearsley encourages wider-ranging imaginative acts of identification – one can identify with the “crafty merchant” of her “Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade” – but ensures through various poetic devices that such an act will reveal the disjunction between family and capital. By drawing out various theories of the working of sentiment, this essay makes visible sentimental poetry’s theoretical power: slavery poems by Williams and Yearsley operate as sophisticated theories of sympathetic identification.

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Tracing out the stages of the reception history of Amelia Opie’s poems, this essay shows that changes in assumptions about sensibility and women’s poetics whereby they came to be gendered “feminine and weak” reduced the political power of Opie’s poetry. Not only Opie’s contemporaneous reviewers but also Opie herself, following their lead in her later publications, enacted a shift in focus from the politics of class to the poetics of gender. At first, the radicalism of some of Opie’s poems that focus on class combined with her appropriately gendered use of a poetics of sentiment rendered conservative reviews ambivalent in their evaluations of her poetry: they approved of the sentimentality but sensed political danger. As Opie accommodated her reviewers’ criticisms, her poetry increasingly conformed to a feminine poetics that obscured the anti-classist and anti-racist radicalism constitutive of her earlier poetics. The political is definitively laid to rest by later generations of critics who see Opie’s work as reflecting rather than analyzing the feelings of her time and thus as merely of nostalgic interest.

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This essay demonstrates how Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, relied upon but also diverged from poetess poetics as a way of forging her own poetic voice without sacrificing the economic success enjoyed by anyone willing to write poetry in the style and manner of the annuals. As a close-reading of both content and context of Blessington’s satiric poem “The Stock in Trade of the Modern Poetess” reveals, Blessington capitalizes on her Byronic disdain for the annuals, thus simultaneously spurning poetess poetry and making a bid for financial success, the success typically enjoyed by writers willing to truck in poetess “stock.” In order to achieve both financial success and poetic merit, Blessington plays to the crowd who expects beautiful images of the nation in poetess poetry, but not by using the same "stock" as does poetess poetry: instead of setting up national heroines to be worshipped, Blessington recasts typical symbols used by the poetess for romantic and domestic relationships as ties that bind one person to another in the nation. Blessington’s oeuvre illustrates one dramatic instance of participation in the poetess tradition, showing us that women writers didn’t simply succumb to poetess conventions but rather manipulated the “stock in trade” of the poetess in order to achieve literary without sacrificing financial success.

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Lydia Sigourney’s (mis)identification as “The American Hemans” serves as a kind of parallel or allegory for the double-bind faced by nineteenth-century woman writers: to become famous, one must be like Hemans, but to be like Hemans is to lose sight of oneself; to signify oneself as a “proper” woman writer, one must utter the sobs of the sentimental woman, but such a voice has been valued by critics at about the level of “anonymous.” Sentimentalism, what is expected of the woman writer if she is to achieve fame, has been seen as manipulation, not an art. In a feminist prose essay on women’s education, Sigourney reveals her desire for fulfillment in roles other than the strictly domestic: she longs for the day when women can be “professors.” A canny poet-engineer taking up the tools of the new sensationist epistemology to become a professor of sentimental rhetoric, Sigourney deploys several poetic voices or personae to communicate her decidedly feminist ethos. The subject positions adopted in her poems are various, ranging from male seminary professor to an edgy, angry, male prophet, from woman rhetor to woman preacher. In Lucy Howard’s Journal, Sigourney prophesies and in some sense prepares her own reception history as a female writing subject whose textual voice can outlive the stultifying critique of feminine sentimentalism.

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This essay describes critics’ relations to sentimentality, and then situates Phillis Wheatley’s poetry within it. Carefully distinguishing between Enlightenment poetry of sensibility and nineteenth-century sentimental poetry allows us to recognize Wheatley as among the first innovators of sentimentality, and it is precisely the politics of “race” which promotes such an innovation. Wheatley’s poetry presents us with a manifesto of sentimentality. She discovered the advantages, in the task of overcoming poetical oppression, of constructing a sentimental poetry that is genuinely intersubjective rather than subjective. What this examination of Wheatley’s work shows us is that the Romantic, expressivist aesthetic, allegedly so spontaneous, can be seen as in fact much more manipulative – at least politically – than Wheatley’s innovative, sentimentalist form.

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This essay heeds Yopie Prins’s recent call to abandon critical attempts to recover the subjectivity of (real) poetesses and instead to look at the culturally constructed figure of the “poetess.” It describes the early reception history of American poetess Lucretia Davidson who died at 16, (possibly of anorexia nervosa). Focused as it was on her death, this transatlantic body of criticism (Southey, Poe) and tribute (Desbordes-Valmore, Karolina Pavlova) offers to the poetess tradition a women’s ethic of self-sacrifice enabling a female form of literary transmission that celebrates women’s interchangeability rather than their uniqueness. An elegy by French poetess Marceline Desbordes-Valmore manipulates Davidson’s image as a means of insisting on the abstemiousness (to the point of death) of the poetess figure despite her hyperproductivity, and then ultimately insists upon the interchangeability and solidarity of women poets. In contrast, Karolina Pavlova’s elegy to Davidson carves out of this transmissible figure her own particular identity, leading to the masculinization of Pavlova’s poetry by Russian critics – and, unfortunately, to Pavlova’s subsequent obscurity. This essay leaves open the question as to which of these two elegists made the “better” choice, delineating instead options for transcontinental women poets in shaping their own subsequent transmission.

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Women poets of the nineteenth century remain for the most part marginalized in the study of French Romanticism, despite the historical fact that women turned to poetry in increasing numbers during the July Monarchy. The poetess’s enduringly ambiguous situation is reflected in the linguistic instability of the terminology used to designate her. This essay takes as its starting point the linguistic uncertainty surrounding the term "poétesse" in the nineteenth century and compares it to Anne Mellor’s definitions of the poetess and the female poet. In a survey of French Romantic poetesses (Desbordes-Valmore, Tastu, Gay, Mercoeur, Ségalas), Mellor’s distinction between two traditions proves to be untenable, as poetesses straddle the fine line between domesticity and social engagement. Ultimately, Mellor’s definition of the poetess in opposition to the female poet does however resonate with French women poets’ critical reception: the invention of the poétesse has largely obscured the critical assessment of women poets’ social engagement.