Abstract
The most important recent criticism of poetry written by women in England during the Romantic period has tended to represent that poetry as the production of what critics have concurred in calling ‘the poetess’. I am thinking especially of the perceptive analyses of the poetry of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon provided by Isobel Armstrong in her chapter on ’Precursors’ in Victorian Poetry (1993), by Angela Leighton in her chapters on Hemans and L.E.L. in Victorian Women Poets (1992), by Cheryl Walker in her chapter on ’The Poetess at Large’ in The Nightingale’s Burden (1982), by Glennis Stephenson in her study of the career of Letitia Landon, Letitia Landon — The Woman behind L.E.L. (1995), as well as of my own attempt to locate the poetry of Hemans and Landon within the Burkean category of the ’beautiful’ in my Romanticism and Gender (1993). Rightly recognizing that the Victorian literary establishment defined Hemans, Landon and their female peers as ’poetesses’, distinctly different from the male ’poet’, these critics have explored and acutely defined the specific literary conventions which governed the productions of these poetesses and helped to construct a feminine ’music of their own’. These conventions encompassed, as Armstrong and others have shown, the adoption of the mask of the improvisatrice.
This essay first appeared in Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997), pp. 26176.
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Mellor, A.K. (1999). The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two Traditions of British Women’s Poetry, 1780–1830. In: Armstrong, I., Blain, V. (eds) Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27024-8_5
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