Personifying the Poetess

Abstract

The historical recovery and scholarly reconstruction of women’s poetry has enabled critics to expand the existing literary canon, to create new canons, or to reconsider the process of canonization itself. But in reclaiming a tradition of women poets, there is also the need to theorize and historicize a category that we assume to be self-evident: namely, the woman poet. It is a category that may be traced back to the nineteenth-century ‘Poetess’, less a person than a persona that emerges during a time when poetry is increasingly defined in terms of its personifying function. An essay entitled ‘Modern English Poetesses’ from the Quarterly Review of 1840, for example, begins:

When we venture to lift a pen against women, straightway apparent facies; the weapon drops pointless on the marked passage; and whilst the mind is bent on praise or censure of the poem, the eye swims too deep in tears and mist over the poetess herself in the frontispiece, to let it see its way to either. (pp. 374–5) According to this account, we read in order to discover a picture of the Poetess in her poem. The face or figure appears (apparent facies) before us, ‘straightway’, no longer mediated by words but producing an unmediated, immediate response of sympathy in the reader. As ‘the eye swims too deep in tears’, the ‘I’ that reads no longer sees itself in the act of reading. We become sentimental readers, identifying with the personification and effacing ourselves in order to sympathize with the face of ‘the poetess herself in the frontispiece’.