Nineteenth-Century Women Poets and Periodical Spaces: Letitia Landon and Felicia Hemans

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-414
Author(s):  
Linda H. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Letitia Landon

scholarly journals Gender, Emotion and Transcendence In John Keats' “Ode On Melanchholy" and Felicia Dorothea Hemans' "Ode to Cheerfulness"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Feminine Identity ◽  
Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Introduction Melancholy has been tied to the Romantic literary tradition and its preoccupation with intensely emotional experiences, as well as the poetic forms that best accommodate them. Odes, elegies and laments are remarkably prominent in the Romantic canon and have come to epitomize the nineteenth century as a time “steeped in melancholy” (Bowring 38). While Romanticism is largely remembered as an age of melancholy, there were many women poets who were unable to fully access these expressions of sorrow, therefore relying on more joyful emotions that are not as closely associated with the period. Poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote on topics of mild sentiment and the domestic, working within structures of feminine identity that were both acceptable and commercial. Although these writers often fought against such conventions in their work, the masculine gendering of melancholy and its connection to poetic genius and transcendence ultimately reduces the ability of women writers to achieve an eternal reputation in the canon of Romantic literature.

Gender, Emotion and Transcendence In John Keats' “Ode On Melanchholy" and Felicia Dorothea Hemans' "Ode to Cheerfulness"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Feminine Identity ◽  
Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Introduction Melancholy has been tied to the Romantic literary tradition and its preoccupation with intensely emotional experiences, as well as the poetic forms that best accommodate them. Odes, elegies and laments are remarkably prominent in the Romantic canon and have come to epitomize the nineteenth century as a time “steeped in melancholy” (Bowring 38). While Romanticism is largely remembered as an age of melancholy, there were many women poets who were unable to fully access these expressions of sorrow, therefore relying on more joyful emotions that are not as closely associated with the period. Poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote on topics of mild sentiment and the domestic, working within structures of feminine identity that were both acceptable and commercial. Although these writers often fought against such conventions in their work, the masculine gendering of melancholy and its connection to poetic genius and transcendence ultimately reduces the ability of women writers to achieve an eternal reputation in the canon of Romantic literature.

LYRICAL STUDIES

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 521-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Jackson ◽  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
On Line ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Victorian Women Poets

THE VICTORIAN POETESS has become as important a figure in the late twentieth century as she was in the late nineteenth — perhaps because she seems now, as then, to have lapsed into the obscurity of literary history. In recent years feminist critics have been interested in reclaiming a tradition of nineteenth-century popular poetesses whose verse circulated broadly on both sides of the Atlantic. A spate of new anthologies, annotated editions, and critical collections (as well as texts now available on-line) has reintroduced supposedly lost women poets into the canon of Victorian poetry. Indeed, this recovery is often predicated on a rhetoric of loss, as if only by losing women poets we can rediscover and read them anew. Thus in recent advertisements for such anthologies, we read that Victorian Women Poets (edited by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds in 1995) “aims to recover the lost map of Victorian women’s poetry,” and British Women Poets of the 19th Century (edited by Margaret Higonnet in 1996) “restores the voices and reputations of these ‘lost’ artists”; likewise, the compendious Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (edited by Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock in 1996) “rediscovers rich and diverse female traditions.”

Nineteenth-century women poets

2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Jump
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Poets

Nineteenth-century women poets

2000 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-346
Author(s):  
Bridget Hill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Poets

Ballad Knowledge and the Poetics of Repetition

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-140
Author(s):  
Alexandra Socarides
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Traditional Ballads ◽  
And Gender

Chapter 3 explores a genre (the ballad) that was wildly popular in nineteenth-century America, and investigates the ways in which women poets entered into discussions about authorship, poetics, and gender through their engagements with it. Focusing in particular on tropes of faithlessness, pride, laziness, and general “badness” that had long marked traditional ballads, this chapter shows how these tropes came to be associated with women and how American periodicals seemed to embrace the circulation of such ballads. But as women poets took up this genre and were faced with how to rewrite this female figure, they pushed its primary convention—repetition—to its limits in order to make explicit the particular problem that accompanies the recitation of “ballad knowledge” for women. Instead of looking away from the scenes of repetition that disempower women, these ballads go right to the center, employing repetitions to new ends.

“Under the subtle wreath”: Louise Bogan, Felicia Hemans, and Petrarchan Poetics1

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nanora Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Women Poets ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Mind

Abstract Louise Bogan joked that in a former life she had been “Felicia Hemans.” A lush Romantic and an austere Modernist, Hemans and Bogan appear polar opposites, yet these learned women poets shared a laureate poetics of Love and Fame. Hemans alludes directly to Petrarch’s laureate triumph in “The Magic Glass”; in poetry and prose she portrays the difficult laureateships of Sappho and Tasso. Both Hemans and Bogan seemed laureates to their contemporaries and successors, yet both found laurels an ambiguous donnée, Bogan a “burden” among flowers, Hemans a fiery crown for the likes of “the Bride of the Greek Isle.” Petrarch gained his laurels in a formal triumph at Rome, a scene mandating abjuration and entailing defeat. His I trionfi enacted triumph and its reversals in a sequence mounting from Love to Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. Bogan’s laurels were similarly fugual, a “subtle wreath” combining “the line of feeling” of “sentimental” women’s poetry with “the line of thought” in masculine Metaphysical Modernism. The poems of Bogan and Hemans that most vex critics – Bogan’s life-denying “Henceforth, from the Mind,” Hemans’s fame-abjuring “Corinne at the Capitol” – read differently as Petrarchan triumphs, that is, as abjurations signaling fresh triumphs to come.

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.

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