Introduction

Abstract

In an anonymous essay published in the November 1832 issue of the New Monthly Magazine, L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) defined the origin and use of poetry as originating “in that idea of superior beauty and excellence inherent in every nature—and it is employed to keep that idea alive; and the very belief in excellence is one cause of its existence” (“Ancient and Modern” 160). The imagination is the “beginning as well as the ornament of civilization. It civilizes because it refines” (161). Margaret Linley discusses the ways that this essay “captures the idea of civilization as both a historical process and as an achieved condition; without poetry there will be no civil nation and without civility there will be no poetry. … Poetry thus guides the modern nation into being and also preserves it from degeneration” (Linley 431). L.E.L.’s lofty prescription for civilization conflates poetry with morality, religion, empire, and feminine ornamentation, a combination that women’s magazines packaged as a domestic commodity. Conduct books contributed to this directive by recommending poetry as a worthy pursuit for women readers, exemplified in advice given to them in 1842 by the anonymous author of The English Maiden: Her Moral and Domestic Duties: “Read poetry. If it be true poetry, it is the twin-sister of religion.