Ann Yearsley to Caroline Norton: Women Poets of the Romantic Period

1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 114-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Wordsworth
2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mulhall

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.


Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Tom Baynes

The numerous resemblances between ‘Isabella’ (1818) and the first English translation of Werther (1779) can be most plausibly attributed to direct influence. Goethe's novel was extremely popular throughout the Romantic period, and was admired by several of Keats's associates. He himself referred to it in 1819, and it may also have influenced two poems that he wrote around the same time as ‘Isabella’. That piece includes a number of details that have no precedent in its principal source (the Fifth Novel of the Fourth Day of The Decameron), but which can be traced, instead, to Werther. For Keats, the proleptic references to death in the latter stages of Goethe's novel may have held an especial appeal, as they could easily have resonated with his own personal experience. On a more speculative note, it is worth asking whether Werther was in his thoughts once again in 1820–21, as his own death drew ever closer.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document