Poems and The Professor

Abstract

When, in 1839, Charlotte Brontë took a reluctant farewell of Angria, she had actually written a greater quantity of prose than that contained in her published novels. But she had also written a certain quantity of verse, and it was in the hope that she might have a future as a poet that she wrote in 1836 to ask Southey, then Poet Laureate, for his opinion. His response, though courteous, was hardly encouraging. He admitted that she did “possess, and in no inconsiderable degree, what Wordsworth calls ‘the faculty of verse’”. But he deprecated “the day dreams in which you habitually indulge”, and warned her against cultivating poetry with a view to celebrity, rather than for its own sake.