Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Anne’s first dated poem, like Emily’s, is from 1836, and she went on writing poetry, again like Emily, until a few months before her death. However, Anne wrote much more poetry in her last years than Emily did, and her later verse represents new and ambitious directions for her, while Emily wrote only two versions of a bloodthirsty Gondal poem. Though she wrote less poetry than her sister, Anne’s extant verse is, almost all of it, finished, accomplished, and shows a technique that she was always refining with delicate, meticulous taste. Right from the start (which means presumably when she wrote poems that she thought worth keeping) she proclaims herself, in a series of Gondal poems, a poet who has her aims clear in her mind, though many traces of an essentially adolescent lifeview can be discerned. Edward Chitham sees most of these Gondal poems as heavily influenced by Emily ( Poems of Anne Brontë , pp. 167–8) but it is worth underlining that Gondal was the creation of both sisters in partnership, and that Anne had an obduracy of her own that was to make her whole poetic output very different in style and subject matter from that of her probably overbearing elder sister. Even when she most recalls Emily’s work, there is also a personality of her own and a sureness of touch that can take the breath away: I have passed over thy own mountains dear, Thy northern mountains – and they ... log in or subscribe to read full text