Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Old English poetry
- 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
- 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
- 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
- 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
- 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
- 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
- 8 Spenser
- 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
- 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
- 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
- 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
- 13 Milton’s shorter poems
- 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
- 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
- 16 Dryden: major poems
- 17 Swift
- 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
- 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
- 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
- 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
- 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
- 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
- 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
- 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
- 27 Byron’s Don Juan
- 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
- 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
- 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
- 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
- 32 Tennyson
- 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
- 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
- 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
- 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
- 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
- 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
- 40 Hardy and Mew
- 41 Yeats
- 42 Imagism
- 43 T. S. Eliot
- 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
- 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
- 46 Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s
- 47 Larkin and the Movement
- 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
- 49 Hughes and Heaney
- 50 Hill
- 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
- 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
- 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
19 - Eighteenth-century women poets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Old English poetry
- 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
- 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
- 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
- 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
- 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
- 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
- 8 Spenser
- 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
- 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
- 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
- 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
- 13 Milton’s shorter poems
- 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
- 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
- 16 Dryden: major poems
- 17 Swift
- 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
- 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
- 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
- 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
- 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
- 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
- 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
- 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
- 27 Byron’s Don Juan
- 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
- 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
- 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
- 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
- 32 Tennyson
- 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
- 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
- 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
- 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
- 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
- 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
- 40 Hardy and Mew
- 41 Yeats
- 42 Imagism
- 43 T. S. Eliot
- 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
- 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
- 46 Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s
- 47 Larkin and the Movement
- 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
- 49 Hughes and Heaney
- 50 Hill
- 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
- 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
- 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
The rediscovery of women’s poetry has transformed the literary landscape of the eighteenth century. As recently as the early 1980s, students and general readers confronted a canon far narrower and almost exclusively male. Although so-called ‘Augustan’ verse had always offered more generic and stylistic diversity than the social and political satire by which the age is often stereotyped, very few poems by women appeared in anthologies or on university syllabuses. Of the several hundred items in Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell and Marshall Waingrow’s compendious Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1969) there are only four poems by women – three by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and one short lyric by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Charles Peake’s Poetry of the Landscape and the Night (1967), a kind of ‘alternative’ eighteenth-century verse anthology, included only one piece by a woman, Finch’s ‘Nocturnal Reverie’. Yet by the mid 1980s much had changed. Feminist criticism and scholarship had invested heavily in rediscovering literary ‘mothers’; and a wide range of textual scholars had started to undertake the challenge of editing some of the many coterie manuscript poems by women which represented a significant facet of female writing of the period. Roger Lonsdale’s ground-breaking Eighteenth– Century Women Poets (1989) helped place in the public domain unfamiliar women poets, some published and popular in their own time, who had since disappeared from view. Eighteenth-century women’s poetry is now widely accessible in both anthologies and individual scholarly editions, and numerous names have now augmented literary syllabuses – the outspoken teenage poetess Sarah Fyge Egerton; the labouring poets Mary Leapor, Mary Collier and Ann Yearsley; middle-class admirers and followers of Pope and Swift, such as Mary Jones and Mary Barber; those who courted scandal for their unconventional lives and autobiographical self-disclosure, such as Laetitia Pilkington and Martha Fowke Sansom.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of English Poetry , pp. 358 - 377Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
References
- 1
- Cited by