Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

During the first half of the nineteenth century, hundreds of women across Europe wrote and published poems we today dismiss as sentimental but that contemporaries considered an integral if albeit minor product of Romanticism. Most of these writers' names and works have long been forgotten; their tears, however, remain emblematic of the romantic poetess. The brunt of criticism aimed at the romantic poetess falls on her abuse of melancholy themes and moods, what Elizabeth Barrett Browning calls in Aurora Leigh (1857) her “Elegiac grief, and songs of love, / Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road, / The worse for being worn” ( Barrett Browning 1992 : 45). Jerome McGann states that sentimental poetry has always been “something of an embarrassment” in the eyes of high culture ( McGann 1996 : 1). Yet the motive for the melancholy so frequently expressed in these women poets' elegiac poems on love and death remains unexplained. While critics often think that they know sentimental poetry all too well, dismissing it as excessive, maudlin, or self-indulgent, we have yet to fully understand how such works should be read. In fact, the question returns so insistently in the poems themselves that it must be considered essential to sentimental poetics. As Letitia Landon (1802–38), one of Britain's two most popular poetess figures of that period, writes in an elegy commemorating sister ... log in or subscribe to read full text