Women’s Lyric, 1880–1920

Abstract

Most accounts of the period from 1880 to 1920 assume a seismic shift in literary trends during these years. This assumption applies to lyric as a genre as well as to women’s writing. How can women’s lyrics shift from the deceptively simple ‘songs’ of Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) to the stark imagism of H.D. (1886–1961) without rupture and repudiation? In the volume that follows this one, Jane Dowson continues to tell a story of disruption between the Victorian and the Modernist periods, distinguishing the women poets of 1920–1945 from the ‘sentimental subject matter’ and ‘clichéd language associated with the denigrated “poetess” of their predecessors’. Yet how can a poet whose modernism arises from inspiration by Swinburne, as Cassandra Laity argues of H.D., reject Swinburne’s own admiration of Christina Rossetti’s formal innovations? Christina Rossetti, often thought of as a mid-Victorian poet, reaches a high point in her long career in the 1880s, while H.D. was publishing her first volume in the last decade covered here. Their works bookend the dynamism of these decades, in which the poems of a Victorian’s maturity and a modernist’s youth share techniques of repetition and simplicity that are “cryptic” and “devastating” in both cases. The simplicity and impersonality that dominated women’s lyric poetry in these years contribute to a modernist avant-garde, culminating in the crystalline imagism of H.D’s early poems. The imagism of H.D.’s Sea Garden continues a line of questioning present in late Victorian women’s poetry about what the lyric is, how and whether it ‘speaks’, and how it might model relational dynamics, reframing how the ‘I’ and ‘thou’ interact in a poem. Women poets of the turn of the century experimented with condensed poetic styles in order to transform the absent presence of lyric from a contradiction in terms to a way of understanding the difficult negotiations between self and other and to accommodate the difference and even discordance of otherness.