“This Close Room”: Elizabeth Barrett’s Proximal Poetics in Sonnets from the Portuguese

2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Gazzaniga
Keyword(s):  
Sonnets From The Portuguese

VICTORIAN WOMAN’S POETRY

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 601-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Shires
Keyword(s):  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽  
Religion And Sexuality

PART OF THE EXCITEMENT of reading Victorian woman’s poetry lies in its manifold refusals to adopt wholesale the codes and conventions of the male poetic tradition. Such refusal may manifest itself in the bold rewriting of forms (as in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese), or in the unhinging of domestic or romantic pieties through irony and other doubling strategies (as in Dora Greenwell’s “Scherzo” or Christina Rossetti’s “Winter: My Secret”). Both the rewriting of male forms and the attack on conventional ideologies opened up new subject positions for women. For example, women’s responses to poetic tradition and to each other’s work initially made use of expressive theory to explore sexual and religious passions simultaneously (as in the poetry of the Brontës), while towards the end of the century, when religion and sexuality were not so inextricably intertwined, women could openly celebrate non-hierarchical sexualities (as in the lesbian poems of Michael Field).

Three Sonnets from the Portuguese; For Voice and Piano

Notes ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 662
Author(s):  
Laura Dankner ◽  
Thomas Pasatieri ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Keyword(s):  
Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽  
Voice And Piano

Mesmerism and Agency in the Courtship of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-319
Author(s):  
Alison Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Female Patient ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Dominant Male ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
Active Subject ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese

It has not passed unnoticed that the courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett coincides with Barrett's ambivalent fascination for mesmerism. But what has not been explicated is the interrelationship between mesmeric agency, the courtship correspondence, and Barrett's autobiographical Sonnets from the Portuguese. Daniel Karlin has suggestively described Barrett's representation of her suitor as an erotic mesmerist, to Browning's discomfort, but Karlin assumes the familiar stereotype of mesmeric power as an unproblematic operation of a dominant male practitioner upon a passive female patient. This essay critiques such an assumption, and suggests that a revised model of mesmeric influence helps elucidate not only Barrett's representation of the courtship in the letters and the Sonnets, but literary influence as well. If Barrett depicts herself in the thrall of a mesmeric agency, then how do we read what is interpreted by feminist critics as her revolutionary active subject position in the Sonnets, which has been taken as the transformation of Victorian women's poetry?

LII Mrs. Browning's Rhymes

PMLA ◽  
1939 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 829-834 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Manning Smith
Keyword(s):  
Lower Class ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽  
House Of Life

For many years critics have been finding fault with Mrs. Browning's rhymes. Asserting that she “richly deserves the place generally accorded her as the foremost poetess of England,” that her Sonnets from' the Portuguese take “rank with Shakespeare's Sonnets and Rossetti's House of Life as one of the three great English sonnet cycles,” that “some of her social poems seem written in blood,” that she is at times “not only original but an equal of the greatest,” and that “her poem ‘The Great God Pan’ is almost perfect,” yet critics repeat the Victorian criticism of her rhymes. Saintsbury considers her “proficient in all the qualities which distinguish the poet from the prose-writer with the exception of ear for rhyme”; and this is what he says of these rhymes: “The dullness or falseness of her ear for consonance of sound was quite unparalleled, and she, with all the advantages of gentle birth, feminine sex, country breeding, and an almost scholarly education, confuses rhymes in a manner usually supposed to be limited to the lower class of cockneys.” Other critics have said her rhymes are “inadmissible,” “eccentric,” “illegitimate,” “slovenly false,” “vicious,” “feeble and commonplace,” “careless and perverse,” “painful,” “really shocking,” and that “few, if any, poets have sinned more grievously or frequently against the laws of metre and rhyme.”

scholarly journals ‘A FONDNESS FOR BEING SAD’: SOME PORTUGUESE SOURCES FOR ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S POETICS OF MELANCHOLY IN SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE (1850)

Diacrítica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Paula Guimarães
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Great Similarity ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Depressed Woman ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Luis De Camoes ◽  
Letitia Landon ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese

In seeing melancholy as the antithesis of poetic creativity, the Victorians often broke with the traditional Renaissance and Romantic attitudes of equating melancholy moods with artistic or poetic genius. This article proposes to explore how, initially viewed as an emotional and ‘depressed’ woman poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to resist and escape the sickening disempowerment or abandonment which had affected poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, and engage in a new poetics of melancholy in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). It demonstrates how the poet plays this poetics out in most of her later sonnets, where she indeed attempts to prove that good poetry can be written without melancholy, even if she herself does not always succeed in this deliberate rejection of ‘dejection’. The article thus intends to suggest, through a brief comparative analysis, that her apparently contradictory poetics of melancholy very probably derived from a specifically Portuguese poetic tradition, namely the ‘fondness for being sad’ of Luís de Camões, as well as the sorrowful love of Mariana Alcoforado’s epistles (1669) and of Soror Maria do Céu’s mannerist poems, an influence that is supported in the great similarity of motives and language that can be found in the respective texts.

‘Not Death, but Love’

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-121
Author(s):  
Kirstie Blair ◽  
Marjorie Stone
Keyword(s):  
Public Domain ◽  
The Public ◽  
In Memoriam ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese

In 2009, a long-unlocated notebook—MSS, by ElizabethBBarrett—re-entered the public domain, including among its contents a sequence titled Sonnets in the night and a previously uncatalogued and unknown draft of ‘Sonnet V’ of Sonnets from the Portuguese, predating all extant manuscripts of this much studied work. The first section of this chapter (Kirstie Blair) analyses the making and unmaking of Sonnets in the night, considering its intricate ordering and EBB’s disassembling of an elegiac sequence which, if published in its notebook form, might have anticipated Tennyson’s In Memoriam in its thematic motifs (voice, song, silence, tears, work, consolation). Section II (Marjorie Stone) further analyses this unmaking in exploring the complicated relations between EBB’s elegiac sequence and Sonnet V of Sonnets from the Portuguese, arguing that composition of the amatory sequence may have begun with the tangled, turbulent draft of this pivotal sonnet, connecting smouldering grief to newly awakened love.

Who Was ‘Kratippos’?

1954 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 53-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. W. Gomme
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Famous Person ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese

My inverted commas are intended; I mean, of whom are Schwartz and Jacoby thinking when they say that the History which was called Kratippos' was a forgery of the second or of the first century B.C. ? The reason for the question is this: most forgeries are of the form, ‘Here is an epigram by Simonides, a new chapter by Thucydides’; or ‘I, a humble scholar or an unknown person, X, have discovered the lost books of Livy, or a hitherto unknown painting by Vermeer, or a privately printed edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese’; that is, the work forged is said to be by a famous person, the discoverer a relatively obscure one. Schwartz and Jacoby, however, say, or imply, that ‘Kratippos’ was the name of the forger, a man who lived, probably, in the first century B.C., and who deceived Dionysios of Halikarnassos (de Thuc. 16) and Plutarch (de glor. Ath. 345d ); but what did he assert that his history was ? Did he say, ‘I, Kratippos, have discovered a lost history dating from a generation after the end of the Peloponnesian war which is a continuation of Thucydides; authorship unknown’? Clearly not, for Dionysios says, and Plutarch quite plainly implies, that they took ‘Kratippos’ to be an author of the early fourth century.

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