30 - Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)

Summary

The last twenty years have been marked by a surge of access to writings by and about Romantic women poets. Specialised anthologies, starting with Roger Lonsdale’s 1989 Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, have followed each other in quick succession, while the more general anthologies have greatly increased their intake of Romantic women poets. The Brown University Women Writers project textbase and databases such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Literature Online, and others, have facilitated access to texts in ways which were barely conceivable thirty years ago. With the availability of primary texts we have also seen an increase in scholarly editions, well-annotated selections, critical studies and major new biographies. Greatly expanded bibliographical tools (Literature Online, the MLA Database) are useful aids for surveying the field. All of these materials, the improved methods of access and the myriad possibilities of specialised searches highlight the quantity, quality and versatility of women poets of the Romantic period. Technological and editorial enhancements have made it possible to study women poets alongside or in dialogue with male poets, and to think about them in their contemporary literary, cultural and political contexts, thereby integrating them into the larger world of letters.

A major reason for the neglect of Romantic women poets in the twentieth century may be attributed to a radical shift of sensibility in the arts towards a more elitist, Modernist aesthetic. A female sensibility which centred on extended professions of grief became over time associated with overindulgence in unearned emotion. The over-exposure, the surfeit of similar poems and by contrast, the masculinist, more minimalist aesthetic of Modernism with its self-consciously iconoclastic experimentation, all contributed to the waning of interest in the Romantic women poets.