Felicia Hemans Also by Julie Melnyk

WOMEN'S THEOLOGY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN: Transfiguring the Faith of their Fathers (editor) Felicia Hemans Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century

Edited by Nanora Sweet Assistant Professor English and Women~\ and Gender Studies University of Missouri - St Louis USA

and Julie Melnyk Associate Professor of English Central Methodist College Fayette Missouri USA

Foreword by Marlon B. Ross Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk 2001 Foreword © Marlon B. Ross 2001 Chapter 4 © Julie Melnyk 2001 Chapter 10 © Nanora Sweet 2001 Chapters 1-3, 5-9 and 11-12 © Palgrave Publishers ltd 2001 * Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2001 978-0-333-80109-3 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, london Wl P OlP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PAlGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PAlGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press llC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press ltd).

ISBN 978-1-349-42094-0 ISBN 978-0-230-38956-4 (eBook) 00110.1057/9780230389564

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Felicia Hemans : reimagining poetry in the nineteenth century I edited by Nanora Sweet, Julie Melnyk; foreword by Marlon B. Ross. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-349-42094-0 (cloth) 1. Hemans, Felicia Dorothea Browne, 1793-1835-Criticism and interpretat'on. 2. Women and literature-Great Britain-History• -19th century. I. Sweet, Nanora, 1942- II. Melnyk, Julie. PR4781 .F45 2000 821'.7-dc21 00-048348

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 To the Eigh teen th- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Association, which provided the location of this project's genesis and the inspiration for its completion Contents

List of Illustrations ix Foreword: Now Our Hemans x Contributors xxvii

Introduction: Why Hemans Now? 1 Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk

I Readings: The Woman's Voices, the Poet's Choices 1 Impure Affections: Felicia Hemans's Elegiac Poetry and Contaminated Grief 19 Michael T. WiIIiamson 2 The Fragile Image: Felicia Hemans and Romantic Ekphrasis 36 Grant F. Scott 3 The Triumph of Voice in Felicia Hemans's The Forest Sanctuary 55 John M. Anderson 4 Hemans's Later Poetry: Religion and the Vatic Poet 74 Julie Melnyk

II Reception: The (Re)Making of the Woman Poet 5 'Certainly not a Female Pen': Felicia Hemans's Early Public Reception 95 Stephen C. Behrendt 6 The Search for a Space: A Note on Felicia Hemans and the Royal Society of Literature 115 Barbara D. Taylor 7 Felicia Hemans and the Shifting Field of Romanticism 124 Chad Edgar 8 'The Spells of Home': Hemans, 'Heimat' and the Cult of the Dead Poetess in Nineteenth-Century Germany 135 Frauke Lenckos

vii vi ii COl1tmts

III Contexts: Cultures of Romance, Histories of Culture 9 Hemans and the Romance of Byron ISS Susa/l J. WolfWIll 10 Gender and Modernity in Tl1e Abe/lcermge: Hemans, Rushdie, and 'the Moor's Last Sigh' 181 NlIIlOm Sweet 11 Death and the Matron: Felicia Hemans, Romantic Death, and the Founding of the Modern Liberal State 196 Gary Kelly 12 Natural and National Monuments - Felicia Hemans's 'The Image in Lava': A Note 212 [sobel Armstrol1g

Till/ex 231 List of Illustrations

2.1 Louis Ducis, 'La Sculpture ou Properzia de Rossi' (Exhibited Salon 1822). Courtesy of the Musee de I'Eveche, Limoges 44 2.2 Edward Burne-Jones, 'The Birth of Galatea' (1885). Courtesy of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 47 2.3 Angelica Kauffman, 'Self-Portrait in the Character of Painting Embraced by Poetry' (1782). Courtesy of the Iveagh Bequest, London 52

ix Foreword: Now Our Hemans

Rest with your still and solemn fame; The hills keep record of your name, And never can a touch of shame Darken the buried brow.

But we on changeful days are cast, When bright names from their place fall fast; And ye that with our glory past, We cannot mourn you now.

Hemans (from' A Fragment') 1

Why Hemans now? Why a collection of essays on Felicia Hemans by one of the leading publishers of trade, scholarly, and text books? What is the Significance of promoting the study of a nineteenth-century provincial British 'poet• ess' whom just over ten years ago even academic specialists had largely forgotten? Does this resuscitation of Hemans tell us something about how an artist's career is unmade and remade long after an author's bones have corroded in the ground? Does it tell us, belatedly placed at the butt of the twentieth century, something about the ongoing cultural status of 'the romantics' - that literary corpus (total work, essential substance, body, corpse) so hopefully taken as a metonym for the promise of universal, eternal, primordial power residing in poetry, literature, and the arts? Does our Hemans play to or against the romantic dream of a native human body wedded to the soul of nature in this era haunted by the guilt of environmental catastrophe? Given Hemans's former reputation as a poetess of 'domestic affections', does our attraction to her in this moment reveal something about that other, academically subordinated, but more popular meaning of 'romantic'; the pleasure of remorse that derives from yielding to an uncurbable careen of feeling? Does Hemans's corpus cover or expose our anxiety over sentiment, an anxiety palpable in the flesh of manly romanticism and still visceral among us as we plunge deeper into virtual electronic lives hyper-regulated by microcomputer rationality and scientific surveillance (niche marketing, political polling, focus grouping, genome coding, genetic cloning)? Or

x Furewurd xi does our settling amidst her 'domestic affections' betoken our larger cul• ture's current nostalgia for a sentimentalized domesticity uncluttered by sexual and gender nonconformity - a neoconservatism, a religious right• eousness, a new traditionalism scurrying fast from the great divides of sex, race, and class as we seek yesterday's never-never-land of homogeneous nations, tight communities, chaste families, and crime-free strollable streets? Does the anatomy of Hemans's corpus tell us something about the fate of academic criticism in an age shaken by postmodern identity wars and rumors of identity wars when the universalizing hope of the word 'human', no longer adjective or noun, has devolved into the fraction• alizing compound 'posthuman'? Does our Hemans reveal something about the institution of postmodern (posthuman?) education in an age of mass-media reproduction of popular 'taste'? After a decade of academic criticism on Hemans informed by feminist, materialist, and historicist theories, such questions have become more - not less - salient.

* * * Deem not, 0 England! That by climes confined, Genius and taste diffuse a partial ray; Deem not the eternal energies of mind Swayed by that sun whose doom is but decay! Hemans (from Modem Greece [2: 208])

'But the joy of discovery was short, and the triumph of taste transitory.' John Chetwode Eustace quoted by Hemans (epigraph to The Restoration oftlze Works of Art to Ital)' 12: ]48])

Taste seems like such an anachronistic word on the verge of the twenty• first century when books and browsing themselves have been prophesied as obsolescent. Hemans emerged in that period when the culture of the book was probably at its apogee; when 'the eternal energies of mind' were seen as encased and preserved through printed books; when the expressive power of even the visual arts and music, thought to be liter• ature's closest rivals, were disseminated most broadly and efficiently through the medium of print; when new magazines and journals con• stituted the latest word in society, religion, science, politicS, and the arts; when books were finally cheap enough and accessible enough to help determine social-class formation and yet also to cause crossover and confusion among genteel, bourgeois, and popular predilections; xii Foreword when taste itself had been made both more real and more mystified by the exhaustive philosophizing of theorists like Burke, Hume, Smith, Hurd, Hazlitt, Kant, Hegel, and by the preachments and practices dis• played in the reviews of the latest tasteful periodicals. Taste is therefore a word wholly in keeping with the aura of a writer like Hemans. She can be seen as central in helping to define the national taste of Britain and Anglophone America during the nineteenth century - and thus also the taste of those global colonies subjected to their imperialist ventures - when book publication came to dominate 'culture', in every sense of the word. We might also see her absetlce from twentieth-century cultural discourses (until the late 1980s) as ironically central to the peculiar controversies and laments infecting claims to and assaults on taste in modernity. Her reputation waned after the turn of the century as books were put in fierce competition with other media - notably film, radio, and sound recordings - in the making of mass cul• tural consumption, with its embattled relation to already-imbricated nineteenth-century notions of genteel-bourgeois-popular taste. With the changing values manifest in naturalism, aestheticism, the avant-garde, high modernism, and new criticism, the cultural elite around the turn of the century reacted against exactly those tasteful qualities found in Hemans's corpus, in which art and form were always put at the service of some higher sense of collective duty (apparently so socially conven• tional), and also at the service of some more visceral sense of proper feeling (apparently deeply felt but seeming to float on the superficial surfaces of poetic lines ostensibly lacking psychological depth). Hemans's weepy lines of sonorous verse index the apex of taste for a nineteenth-century culture desperate for literary modes that could interfuse the refined and the popular without jeopardizing the particular values associated with either. Hemans's insistent repetitions of rhythms, rhymes, images, concepts, and words (like '0', 'deem', 'clime', 'diffuse', 'sway', 'doom', 'decay' in the above passage from Modem Greece) greatly appealed to nineteenth-century readers even as or perhaps because they bodied forth her continuity with the family hearth, the familiar motherland, the literary tradition, her affinity with other popular women poets, with any poet of either sex seeking popularity and respect, and with civilizing conventions imagined to be so established as to be unassailably permanent, though fearfully permeable by savage others. (And with Hemans's various poems on such savage others as bereft Indian mothers she was able to bring even them familiarly into the comfortable parlor.) Her poetry invited - or perhaps demallded - repetition in another way as well. It was Foreword xiii intended to be read aloud repeatedly for the family assembled before the hearth. It was intended to be committed to memory and recited on occasions so humanly familiar as to be ritualized pathos: birth, schooltime, courtship, betrothal, anniversary, desertion, pilgrimage. homecoming, exile, war, victory, defeat, funeral. Hemans's poetry could represent per• fectly the sort of writing that successive generations of twentieth-century authors have attacked and dismissed as they have staked their claims to a progressive modernity fit for the brutal, clanging realities of whatever seems most current. For our waning century, in which alienation from human subjectivity has marked the definitively human (at least for those who have had the luxury of writing extensively on such matters). Hemans and her poetry have seemed too human to count. When T. S. Eliot wrote his influential 1919 essay, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', insisting on a necessary balance between 'tradition' and poetic individuation, the 'tradition' that he referred to had already absented the Victorians' reputable Mrs Hemans. And ollr Hemans - the one we are now trying to dub for a postmodern audience - can be recognized as having had any bearing on Eliot's sense and sensibility only if we embark on a research project to see whether he knew about her (he must've, we want to say). Or, only if we dub her into his work even when he fails to mention her for the purpose of her dismissal. By the time of Eliot's 1919 essay, Hemans was already a double absence• both dismissed and unmentionable as dismissed - at least in the emer• ging center of elite modernism, if not in the recitation lessons of obedi• ent schoolchildren. In oblique reference to his own hard, terse, impersonal, objective, anti-sentimental, abstrusely difficult modernist poetics, Eliot wrote: 'The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.' But Eliot's 'process of depersonal• ization and its relation to the sense of tradition' purposively looked nothing like Hemans's feminine self-sacrifice of individualism for the sake of adapting her voice to demonstrably tasteful literary and social conventions.2 In order to prove that great poetry has little to do with the familiar and familial, and instead approaches 'the condition of science', Eliot forced on us 'a suggestive analogy', in which the artist is compared to 'a bit of finely filiated platinum' (p. 7). The appeal to tltlCllogy itself countered the protocols of a hard, objective (that is, maSCI/line) modern science and re-established Eliot's fatal attraction to the soft. sentimental (that is, feminine) anachronisms of mere rhetoric, figurative speech, decorative language, poetic convention as marginal to the hard-ass reality of sci• entific fact. Eliot nonetheless proceeded to equate poetic modernity xiv Foreword with depersonalization: 'The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material' (pp. 7-8). When Eliot's poetry sang, as it did in 'Pre• ludes' (1917)-

I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.:l

- it was not supposed to represent Eliot's person moved and clinging in sympathy to an infinitely suffering thing. Instead, Eliot wanted to insist that the man Eliot was wiped clean from the poem, and that the poem itself (tile poet Eliot) voiced objectively the suffering of the material reality of modernity. The thingness of Eliot's suffering was supposed to make us notice its fresh unfamiliarity as modern (that is, ClIrrent) poetry, but it necessarily reminds us of that traditional (and yes, conventional) mel• ancholic strain composed in English verse by the likes of Donne, Shake• speare, Collins, Gray, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Hardy, Brooke, and Hemans. Not to mention nameless others. Eliot's scientifically impersonal imagery is different from (and yet how similar to!) Hemans's. His figuring of the poet's mind as 'a bit of finely filiated platinum' seems, with the hindsight of our belatedness, to make her 'eternal energies of mind' seem innocent, perhaps even naIve. How heavy is platinum weighted against Hemans's partial rays of the swaying sun diffused into ephemeral and inconstant climates? Her imagery is no less 'scientific', however, when we consider the differing protocols denoting science between her time and his. Like the male poets of her time, Hemans heated her lines with the torch of science's most recent truths, even though what may have been her age's scientific discoveries are now little less than errant cliches. Her poetry is also no less abstract, impersonal, even depersonalized than Eliot's - her proper person being totally erased from its imagined scenes. And yet, nineteenth-century readers witnessed her person, personality, and passions self-evidently strewn, however nicely, across myriad biers of countless wailing mothers, lost lovers, disappointed explorers, and angelic children passed into somnolent death. For her nineteenth-century readership, the evidence of Mrs Hemans's poetic genius was the familiar assumption of her suffering Foreword xv person wed to her passionately restrained lines of familial verse. Hemans was taken as a spokeswoman for particular respectable British families strewn across the empire in a particular moment of time; and as such, she was all-the-more taken as bespeaking the common interests of the whole human family, whose ultimate experience the empire desired to tutor, rule, and represent. For his modern audience, Eliot needed to appear to 'completely separate' personal sentiment, 'the man who suffers', from the great modern poet, 'the mind which creates', and one of the ways in which he tried to do so was to attempt to reject the idea in Hemans's poetics of commemor• ating the familiar as common recitation binding the most intimate personal spaces of affection to the most celebrated public events. Of course, Eliot was trying to outdo and overcome Wordsworth in a futile attempt to distinguish between the conventions of passion and the conventions of art, between habitual personal experiences and what Eliot called poetry's 'structural emotion' or 'new art emotion' (p. 10). Likewise, he was trying to outdo and overcome Keats when he futilely declared poetry devoid of all personal emotion, all personality, for the sake of a hard scientific mastery of alien material. Just as there was no substantial difference between Eliot's emotive philosophy and that of his romantic forebears, so there can be no substantial demarcation separating his poetics from those of nineteenth-century poetesses like Hemans and Joanna Baillie, whose musings over the place of personal• izable passions in poetic composition both influenced and unbalanced poets like Wordsworth and Keats. In his 1921 essay, 'The Metaphysical Poets', Eliot outlined his history of (male European) poetry as a 'dissociation of sensibility', a crisis rending sentiment from thought supposedly occurring in the seventeenth century as the result of those two manly giants, Dryden and Milton. Eliot neces• sarily put forward a history that doubly absented even the notion that someone like a Hemans could exist in that great interstice between the European Renaissance (premodernity) and himself (nervous white male modernism). 'The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued', he wrote.

The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's Trillmph ofLife, in the second Hyperion, there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.

(p.248) xvi Foreword

If we try to fit Hemans into this history, she holds up rather well. Although there are certainly other kinds of dissociation in Hemans's work, there is no crisis of sensibility, no irreparable break between thought and emotion, no rumination, no revolt against the ratiocinative as such. The history itself falls apart, exposes itself as Eliot's thinking and feeling by half-conscious nervous fits. Eliot needed to forget that he was dismissing the long tradition of women's influence on and in poetry in order to construct a history of poetry as a IInil'l!rsai crisis in sensibility. He had to displace the influential women writers who provoked this crisis (in some male poets) with laboriously unsentimental men whose work could easily be dismissed if we were to write a similar sort of history from the worldview of the 'sentimental' women poets highly influential in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Confronted with the balanced poetics but unbalancing influences of Hemans's poetry, Eliot's impersonal history of poetic modernization is uncloseted: it begins to look like an unselfconscious anecdote of his own personal taste unbalanced by his desire to escape poetry's imbrication in un-modern feminine subjectivity. Could it be that Eliot's fretting over a dissociation in sensibility was really a matter of the intensifying crisis in elite book culture? In an age of science, public education, radio, phonograph recordings, and film, would Eliot be able to achieve the sort of acclaim through writing versified books that Wordsworth and Keats managed in the absence of such modern media? The emergence of new media technologies may partly explain the modernist and new critical double evasion of a poetess like Hemans, but it cannot sufficiently account for her own increasing obscurity as the century proceeds. The cultural reputation of other authors - Wordsworth and Keats, for instance - has been retained, sometimes even enhanced, despite the diminishing hegemony of genteel and book culture and the expanding hunger of mass consumption. If Hemans was able to maneuver taste as a smooth fusion of the popular and genteel for her nineteenth-century readers, why would not her reputation continue to grow with the explosion of smoothing techniques designed for simultaneous incitement and containment of popular, familiar passions so characteristic of mass media forms? Does the current dubbing of Hemans in academic criticism represent her emerging power as a countering voice within or against modernity, revealing further its arbitrary, deformative relation to the bookish ideal of taste? Or does it represent some final backlash of nostalgic mourning for bookish discourse itself, some impossible desire to replenish taste by rediscovering the resourceful panorama of forgotten influential authors at the moment when modernity seems to have exposed the triumph of Foreword xvii taste as merely transitory? Can Hemans regain significance beyond the culture of taste, which she helped to bring to a climax always seemingly premature? Can Hemans regain an audience beyond academe, remake the standard lists of select writers taught in grammar and secondary schools? Can Hemans's corpus appeal to the mass televisual readers whom Oprah has cultivated through her genius for fusing seemingly excessive sentiment and bossy judgment, comfortable pop psychology and stirring social criticism, conventional religiosity and empathy for the nonconforming margins, mass cultural hunger and the aura of refining taste? (The analogy to Oprah might prove useful for thinking about how both she and Hemans have operated in a continuous popular-mass tradition in which a self-consciously suffering, weeping feminized body/intellect intervenes in culture to bring about such a fusion.) Only volumes like the one you hold now can begin to determine whether there is a logic - causal, casual, or otherwise - to Hemans's counter-influence within modernity. As evident from Eliot's escapist history, however, even if her name was temporarily and intentionally forgotten, the fear of what she represents has not been.

* * * The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck Shone round him o'er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood, As born to rule the storm; A creature of heroic blood, A proud, though child-like form. Hemans (from 'Casabianca' [4:(571)

When I first began to study Hemans in the 1980s, I thought of her poetry-making as creating a crisis ill taste for early nineteenth-century readers and writers in Britain. As an immensely respected allli popular middle-class woman poet at that time, Hemans, I thought, necessarily challenged, at conscious and unconscious levels, certain protocols about the proper social place and historical course of the 'literary' in its relation to the dominant economy of politics and culture. I saw her poetry as evincing a cultural struggle between ideology and desire occurring within and through debates about the rising influence of the xviii Foreword

'poetess' at the turn of the eighteenth century - manifested as embattled notions of masculine and feminine conduct, individualistic and collectivist social practice, genteel and bourgeois social status, elite and popular culture, Tory and Whig politics, and traditional and disruptive artistic forms. In Tile Contours of Masculine Desire, I argued for observing a taste• crisis in the romantics' reception and corpus (a quaking of their texts, a trembling in their material bodies) occurring in reaction to the voices of women poets, as they were increasingly perceived as endowed with the heavenly power of imparting taste, not only directly as a project of art and aesthetics, but also obliquely in the arena of national and imperial power-politics. The project of aesthetics, as Naomi Schor has pointed out, was invested in keeping women metonymic objects of the beauti• ful arts, even as they increasingly were recognized as creative subjects in their own right, as they helped to author the powers of those arts. My question then was: What difference does it or can it make when a middle-class 'poetess' achieves a voice (metaphor for personality, authenticity, reputation, authorship, authority) amidst the likes of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats - men whose last names standing alone have come to bespeak the impregnable tran• scendence of a great (national and yet universal) literary tradition? But the taste-crisis and the gaining of literary subjectivity are only small parts of the question of how popular women poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rose to and fell from visible cultural influence. One aspect of the European notion of taste has been that it is unteachable, especially by democratizing public institutions. Taste rules that inefficient, ineffable sphere called 'the literary' - that which myster• iously divides the ill-bred from noble bloodlines, genius from dem• agoguery, and the civilizers from primitives, savages, niggers, and peasants. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has set out to debunk taste when he writes: 'Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum viSits, concert-going, reading, and so on), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin.'~ Despite Bourdieu's - and many others' - best efforts, according to popII/ar wisdom there is still no accounting for taste. Taste cannot be quantified by scientists, surveyed by social scientists, legislated by democrats, or made accountable and thus efficient by corporate bureaucrats. Rather, taste remains somewhere in the heroic blood, somehow borne within those born to rule the Foreword xix storm of nature and the storm of the rabble in barbarous global cultures. 'Casabianca' was one of Hemans's most famous poems, so widely known in Britain and its colonies and Anglophone America as to be obligatory learning for schoolchildren. In other words, it was central to the English-speaking canofl, the standard but contestable curriculum of authors prescribed as essential learning for various levels of acculturation to the dominant conventions and values of nationalist empire. Although taste and canon are most frequently seen as fully complementary, the work of poetesses like Hemans helps to reveal the dissociation at stake in the relation between these two concepts. Whereas taste appeals to an elusively intrinsic (and thus unteachable) knowingness confirmed by blood (high birth, preternatural intelligence, national predilection, race, spiritual elect, secular priesthood, intellectual kinship with genius), canon relies instead on the normalizing capacity to teach lesser others how and why certain individuals (or nations, cultures, races) are great, whether as artists or as statesmen and warriors. Canonization - the process of establishing and maintaining a canon - appeals to the nationalist strength of public institutions (schools, universities, national and pro• vincial agencies, publicly incorporated archives, libraries, museums, radio stations, television networks, and so on) in seeking the benefit of democracy against the harmful assumptions of blood prejudice. The canonizing premise, however fraught with conflict and ambivalence, assumes that these lesser others can emulate and potentially be raised to the level of those great ones. Where particular works are taught to whom by whom in particular moments reveals a great deal about the exigencies and disparities between the appeals of taste and the demands of canonization. When I first began to make public in collegial conversations and at conferences in the mid-1980s my interest in Hemans and other women poets, I encountered a typical reaction from some colleagues. They would express befuddlement and/or bemusement that a writer once so popular at the early rungs of the educational system should receive serious critical attention by an ostensibly credentialed academic. 'Oh, yes, we used to learn that stuff in grammar school. Do you know her poem, "The boy stood on the burning deck ... //?' When I confessed to knowing the poem, they only became more perturbed. Well, they would relent, a litermy• historical interest in such a poetess is understandable but any aesthetic interest or any serious attempt to canonize such a poet!? 'Casabianca' had become the signature piece for Hemans in a way that 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' - frequently taught in secondary schools and rarely xx Furew(}rd examined in academic criticism (except as a prelude to some greater work of his) - could not be allowed to become ti,e signature piece for Words• worth. Although from the outset I made explicit my concern for denmoll• izatiol1 - the critique of how literary canons, periods, forms, and careers are ideologically constructed for the material, intellectual, and cultural benefit of some and the deprivation of others - my interest was repeatedly (mis)taken for canonizing Hemans. In a sense, this (mis)take was both honest and accurate. For always at stake in the deconstruction of past and current taste as an ideological asset of particular raCial, sexual, and class interests is the question of which authors will be taught to whom in what ways for whose purposes. In other words, decanonization always invites recanonization in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Haunting my own project of de/re/canonization was the question: Why Hemans? From the feminist vantage that I wanted to advance, I think that it was crystal clear why attention to a 'poetess' was crucial, even though my acad~mic interlocutors would so frequently trot out obscure male poets from the period to see whether I had read them and had remembered that they had also been demoted in or ousted from the canon. But why this particular poetess? In COl/tollrs of Masculine Desire, Hemans represented the capstone of a women's poetic tradition because she was able to achieve both high regard and broad dissemination over a long stretch of history. I also chose Hemans to embody the fugitive aspects of reading and writing poetry, aspects marginalized in canonical theories and methods: the arbitrariness of value, the ideology of indi• vidual and collective desires, the historical blood-prejudice immanent in all cultural claims to genius. It could be argued that a stronger case could be made for other women poets (for instance, Mary Tighe and L.E.L., who play lesser roles in the book) in attempting a critique of literary value based in materials and practices disregarded by academic and popular criticism. If Tighe or L.E.L. could have served my argument better exactly because their reputations and literary practices were more fugitive, why Hemans? Was my choice incidental? Was my 'attraction' to her accidental? Was there some deeper logic hidden in my personal and/or historical condition? In my choice of materials and topics, certain public and thus citable intellectual influences were evident then and remain so now. Margaret Homans had used feminist psychoanalysis to understand the gendered writing practices of some better-known women poets. The gender theories of developmental socialization offered by feminist social scientists like Sherry Ortner, Carol Gilligan, and Nancy Chodorow were still current, though controversial. Feminist literary historians like Jane Tompkins had Foreword xxi

challenged the aesthetic assumptions marginalizing women's engagement with sentimental writing. Critical historicists - most notably Jerome McGann, Marilyn Butler, James Chandler, and Marjorie Levinson - had begun to open the romantic period to critique by using materialist methods that asked us to trace the ideological limits and repressions of romanticism as an aesthetically- and politically-invested project. Jon Klancher had brought attention to the historical formation of reading audiences as a palpable influence on romantic writing. And Stuart Curran had presented his ground breaking paper on the women poets of the period, 'Romantic Poetry: The I Altered', at an MLA conference. Men• tioning Hemans in a crucial passage that deserves to be quoted in full, Curran pointed out in the published version of the essay:

Hemans and Landon [L.E.L.J, to be sure, paid a price for their celebrity, at once fulfilling and defining a literary niche that, however important historically, may explain, if not exactly justify, their later neglect. For the bourgeois public of the 1820s and 1830s their names were syn• onymous with the notion of a poetess, celebrating hearth and home, God and country in mellifluous verse that relished the sentimental and seldom teased anyone into thought. There are other and darker strains in their voluminous production - a focus on exile and failure, a celebration of female genius frustrated, a haunting omnipresence of death - that seem to subvert the role they claimed and invite a sophisticated reconsideration of their work against the complex background of the transition between Romantic and Victorian poetic modes. But such an analysis must itself depend on our understanding of their principal inheritance, which is not that of the British Romanticism that died young but rather of a half-century of women writers who determinedly invaded a male fiefdom and reconceived its polity.'

This statement, and the sentences that succeed it in the essay, could stand as an inspiring motto for all the work focused on Hemans in the 1990s, including the essays in this volume. But Curran does not single out Hemans for extended analysis; instead he reserves his close-reading efforts for Mary Robinson, Jane Taylor, Anna Barbauld, Ann Yearsley, and Charlotte Smith. Clearly, other avenues could be taken than the one leading to the centrality of Hemans. There was certainly enough resistance to the idea of Hemans in some quarters to warrant further investigation. Even when my 'attraction' to Hemans could draw a nearly vitriolic response from otherwise dispas• sionate academics - as it most certainly did from one scholar at the xxii Foreword

1988 International Romantic Revolutions conference in Bloomington, Indiana, when he passionately rose to speak in defense of British civilization and implied that barbarians were too near the gates - I tended to connect such passions with something intrinsic to Hemans or to her culminating role in the poetess tradition. I resisted at the time connecting such passion with cultural identifications (racial, geographic, gender, sexual) associated with my own person. In my book, I studiously avoided the personal implications of my 'attraction' to Hemans - including the potential influence of a racially segregated childhood at home, school, and church immersed in poetry recitations culled from a wide (indiscriminate?) range of romantic and Hemans-like poets, but not including Hemans. Barely beneath the surface of my own consciousness, there must have existed some notion that the noticeably effeminate voice of a black boy from the US South would bring a different register to the dominant discourse on 'the romantics'. Somehow Hemans reson• ated with this call for a different voice. Could it be that I was prepared for Hemans's affectional sites of repetitive recitation by the particular familial and familiar conditions of my upbringing? Where one dominating canon is called into question, could it be that there are other socially sub• ordinated, historically repressed, and nostalgically personalized canons already at work in what Hemans calls 'the songs your father loved'? Just as there are yet unanalyzed histories preparatory to our choice of Hemans, so there are yet unanalyzed cultural consequences to the current project of delre/canonizing this poetess. Are we prepared, for instance, to see 'Casabianca' returned to the canon of grammar-school classrooms as we construct a critical canon on Hemans that implicitly nominates other works for signature status? According to Eliot's modernist tenets, 'Casabianca' is self-evidently a mawkish, bad poem. Now that we have begun to trace how a canonical writer like Eliot can possess self-confident affirmations of refined, cutting-edge taste based in historical and psychic evasions silently overdetermined by 'blood' (that is, nation, race, class, gender, kinship, and other cultural identities), how do we also trace the 'blood' lineage of poems like 'Casabianca', while also del re/canonizing their formerly marginal authors? If a change in literary values within academe helps to refashion some small change in bour• geois-popUlar-mass taste through the institutional apparatus of secondary• school classrooms and other media by nurturing an 'attraction' for poetesses like Hemans, who have come to represent canonical and thus cultural resistance to hegemonic ideologies, how can we exorcise the inescapable 'blood' prejudices of such artists, given that these prejudices constitute, in the end, the lifeblood of their works? Fon'Word xxiii

Hemans describes what 'Casabianca' is about in a footnote: 'Young Casabianca, a boy about thirteen years old, son to the Admiral of the Orient, remained at his post (in the Battle of the Nile) after the ship had taken fire, and all the guns had been abandoned; and perished in the explosion of the vessel, when the flames had reached the powder.' The Young Casabianca is a perfect emblem of filial duty, blind patriotism, masculine bonding and conquest, militant imperialism neatly wrapped up in a very teachable and recitable poem that we can easily imagine appealing to many schoolchildren and their teachers. Just beneath the pious surface of loyal self-sacrifice and dutiful affection to bloodkin and humankind lies a luridly bloody fascination with violent frontier adventure worthy of the mass appeal of the most recent Star Wars movie. Plunged into the heart of savage, barbaric Africa, Young Casabianca resists this heart of darkness by stiffening his upper lip in fatal support of a concentric series of affections for father, hearth, home, homeland, religion, nation, race, and empire - ultimately yoking him to the bloodiest exploitations of European colonialism. Whether such a poem is used to teach for or against (or perhaps necessarily both at once) tra• ditional imperialist impulses, we cannot escape the bloodties informing our current 'taste' for the author of this poem.

* * * Sing them upon the sunny hills, When days are long and bright, And the blue gleam of shining rills Is loveliest to the sight! Sing them along the misty moor, Where ancient hunters roved, And swell them through the torrent's roar, The songs our fathers loved! -

The green woods of their native land Shall whisper in the strain, The voices of their household band Shall breathe their names again; The heathery heights in vision rise Where, like the stag, they roved - Sing to your sons those melodies, The songs your fathers loved! Hemans (from 'The Songs of Our Fathers' [4: 148-50]) xxiv Foreword

As a poet of 'domestic affections', Hemans possesses a riddling relation to sentiment no less than that of the canonical romantics, who battled manfully to master the cult of sentiment without becoming tainted by the ostensible excesses of sentimentality. ·fhe mellifluous rhythms and rhymings of her verse can lull us into thinking otherwise. Similarly, Hemans's affectional poetics can make the ideological strife attendant upon a refining missionary culture seem far distant from the comforting songs ollr or YOllr fathers loved. She never tells us in her poem 'The Songs of Our Fathers' (bearing an epigraph from Wordsworth) whir/l songs in particular these fathers loved. She assumes that we'll know them because they were sung to us in our childhood. She also assumes a healthy and healthful cultural continuity from generation to generation and age to age - not allowing us to consider whether our/your fathers' songs have deteriorated into senseless words or have been arranged into mesmeriz• ing fascist paeans that bind the spirit to tyranny. With its lack of specific locales and naming of songs, 'The Songs of Our Fathers' seems like a pure tribute to the traditional as a universal eventuality that we dare to escape only at our peril. The poem admon• ishes us to recall and cling to those lessons inculcated in our childhood by teaching them to our children:

Teach them your children round the hearth, When evening fires burn clear, And in the fields of harvest mirth, And on the hills of deer; So shall each unforgotten word, When far those loved ones roam, Call back the hearts which once it stirr'd, To childhood's holy home.

(4: 150)

On closer inspection, we realize that the poem is so unconsciously spe• cific that it is hopelessly parochial and dated (like all poems). Most obviously, the phrase 'heathery heights' recalls the specific English source of your fathers' songs. How could Hemans have known that the 'hearth', already a worn synecdoche in her time, would become wholly archaic - recalling for future readers a time so far gone as to be irre• trievable? In an age of satellite television, video, and the World Wide Web, the idea of families gathering to sing our forefathers' songs around a 'hearth' seems senseless. And yet, the family hearth is a cliche Foreword xxv still resonant, appealed to nostalgically on the political left and right as an admonishment to return to practices of parental authority, child• hood innocence, family order, Judaeo-Christian faith, and tight community - practices that probably never existed in the ways that they have been constantly reimagined. 'Harvest mirth' and 'hills of deer' likewise recall the particular locales in the parochial English countryside from which these cliches of Anglophone poetic diction have been derived and have been spread around the globe with British empire. In this post-urban moment replete with lamentations over global• izing mass culture, lost rural countryside, and impending environmental catastrophe, we should not be surprised if 'harvest mirth' and 'hills of deer' can evoke strong sentiments exactly because they carry so little practical meaning for the everyday lives of people in post-industrial societies. The songs of your forefathers are simultaneously so familiar and long gone. Hemans's powerful evocation of past songs whose words are not 'unforgotten' makes us wonder how she herself could function as one of our forefathers. Do Hemans's songs resist or inspire the need for other theories, methods, and cultural practices beyond past authorities and their errors? What role can Hemans play in our continuing interest in feminism and critical historicism? Do her songs birth or abort new interests in the application of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, environmentalism, cyborg theory, and the so-called new romanticism and new formalism? Does our return to Hemans represent the death of a literary period with its attendant academic specialization? Or does it represent retrenchment? Reconstruction?

* * *

Thou has left sorrow in thy song, A voice not loud but deep! The glorious bowers of earth among - How often didst thou weep'?

Where couldst thou fix on mortal ground Thy tender thoughts and high? Now peace the woman's heart hath found, And joy the poet's eye. Hemans (from 'The Grave of a Poetess' 15: 225]) xxvi Foreword

Hemans seems to have understood that culture (whether as refined civilization, the creative arts, or a particular way of life) has everything to do with social conventions. On the one hand, her poetry could contribute to democratization: opening opportunities for women to speak, feeding the canon of public education, leveling poetic discourse so that it may flow smoothly across the populace, spreading the univer• sality of passion to savage others in the image of the familiar and famil• ial. On the other hand, it could also hover in the sphere of taste, as it seeks to spread a culture of exclusion, teaches dutiful obedience to pat• riarchal-national-impedalist order, and normalizes the hearth in the familiar image of the middle-class white heterosexual European family unit. Can we resuscitate one without also perpetuating the other? Vol• umes like this one are crucial to garnering a fuller understanding of Hemans as a signal voice in this doublecrossing legacy of literacy, the literary, literature, and romanticism. Whether we come to mourn beside the grave of a poetess or to raise the dead, whether we fix our tender thoughts on mortal ground or on something higher but less tan• gible, only future readers can tell.

MARLON B. Ross

Notes and References The Works of Mrs Hemans; with a memoir of her life by her sister [ed. Harriett Hughesj, 7 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood; London: Cadell, 1839), vol. 5, p. 127. All citations to Hemans's work are to this edition by volume and page. 2 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, New Edition (New York: Harcourt, 1950), p. 7. Sub• sequent references to Eliot's essays cite this edition. 3 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (London: Methuen, 1950), p. 13. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of tile Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 1. 5 Stuart Curran, 'Romantic Poetry: The I Altered', Romanticism and Femillism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 189. Contributors

John M. Anderson is a full-time lecturer at Boston College. He has pub• lished essays about Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and other Romantic-era women poets. He is currently studying these poets' diction: across their careers, in comparison to the diction of other women poets, and in the context of the Romantic 'break' from earlier poetic diction.

Isobel Armstrong is Professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has written widely on nineteenth-century fiction, poetry and feminist theory and has recently co-edited an authoritative anthology of women's poetry of the nineteenth century and two volumes of essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Stephen C. Behrendt is George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Among his publications are Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte (1997), Reading William Blake (1992), and Shelley and His Audiences (1989), as well as several edited collections of essays on British Romanticism. He is co-editor with Harriet Kramer Linkin of Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period and Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception. A widely published poet, he has pub• lished two collections of poetry, Instruments of the Bones (1992) and A Step in the Dark (1996). His current major projects involve various aspects of the recovery of neglected and marginalized texts by women writers of the Romantic period.

Chad Edgar has taught literature at the University of Wisconsin, Mad• ison. His dissertation is primarily a comparison of the careers of Felicia Hemans and Lord Byron, but secondarily it is a study of the mediating influence of gender in the Romantic poet's pursuit of a popular audience.

Gary Kelly is Professor of English at University of Alberta and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has also taught at the University of Keele in England. He has published widely on Romantic fiction and women writers of the Romantic period, notably in his influential Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827 (1993). He is presently

xxvii xxviii Contributors

working on the popular idiom - relations of language, print, culture, and politics - in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain.

Frauke Lenckos holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan. Her area of expertise is the poetry of British, German, and jewish women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dr Lenckos is the editor of an anthology of jewish women's poetry and the translator of novels by the German-Israeli writer Angelika Schrobsdorff. She is also editing a book about Barbara Pym and Marcelle Morphy. She is a participant in the Longfellow Institute at Harvard University. Her work is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Memorial Foundation for jewish Cul• ture in New York.

Julie Melnyk is Associate Professor of English at Central Methodist College in Fayette, Missouri. She received her M.Phil. from Oxford University and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. She writes on nineteenth-century women's religiOUS literature. She is editor of Women's Tlleology ill Nincteellth-Centllry Britain: Tmnsfigllrillg tile Faith of Their FIltllers (1998). Her current projects include an exploration of women's hymns as an alternative tradition of women's poetry.

Marlon B. Ross is Professor of English and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Ross's The Contollrs of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and ti,e Rise of Women's Poetry appeared in 1989. He has published articles on Romanticism, gender, nationalism, and imperial ecology in Romanticism and Feminism, Re-Visiolling Roman• ticism, Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literatllre, The Lessons of Romanticism, and elsewhere.

Grant F. Scott is Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania and the author of Tile Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis and ti,e Visual Arts (1994). His essay on nineteenth-century visual repres• entations of Keats's 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' is forthcoming in Studies ill Romanticism. He is currently at work on a new edition of the selected letters, memoirs, and journals of joseph Severn.

Nanora Sweet is Assistant Professor in the English Department and Institute for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri• St. Louis. She has published on Hemans in At tile Limits of Romanticism, Tile Lessons of Romanticism, Approaches to Teaclling Britis/l Women Poets of the Romantic Period, Tile Novel's Sedllctions: Stael's Corinne in Critical (:()l1triblltors xxix

IIIC/11;')', and the European Romantic Review and has contributed entries on Hemans to new editions of the CamiJriti.«e Ribliosraplly of English Literature and the Dictiolltll)' of National Biosraphy.

Barbara D. Taylor teaches in the School of Continuing Education at the University of Nottingham. Her Ph.D. thesis, Felicia HemaflS: tile wakins of a professional poet constructs a narrative of the poet's writing life.

Michael T. Williamson is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He also directs the Writing Center and the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at the Armstrong County Campus, a small liberal arts campus that serves underprivileged students. He is currently working on a book on Tennyson's elegies.

Susan ]. Wolfson is Professor of English at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Formal Cl!m:,