1 - The Shaping of a Poetics

Summary

Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing: there has been no playing at skittles for me in either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work… and as work I offer it to the public …

(Works 2:570)

Thus wrote Elizabeth Barrett in the preface to her fourth collection of poetry, the two-volume Poems published in 1844. By this stage, EBB was a well-established poet with a growing reputation and, as this phrasing suggests, a poet who was dedicated to her craft as intellectual labour requiring skill and determination. The writing of poetry was neither a game nor an accomplishment for her but a demanding and challenging profession. Indeed, six years after the publication of Poems, EBB's commitment to her ‘work’ would result in her being put forward for the post of poet laureate on the death of William Wordsworth in 1850. It would be, the Athenaeum argued, ‘an honourable testimonial to the individual’ and ‘a fitting recognition of the remarkable place which the women of England have taken in the literature of the day.’ EBB is one of very few women to have been seriously considered for the laureateship – which was only awarded to a female poet, Carol Ann Duffy, for the first time in 2009 – and whilst the 1850 post was eventually awarded to Alfred Tennyson, the debate about EBB as potential laureate reveals how she had firmly claimed a position in the public consciousness as one of Britain's leading poetic figures, despite the fact that by then she was living as an expatriate poet in Florence.

But what did EBB consider the function of the poet to be? How did she think the poet was formed? And what currency did she believe poetry to have in the modern world? In both her poems and prose writings (her prefaces, essays and letters), EBB is constantly grappling with these questions and interrogating her profession throughout a career which spans five decades from the mid-Romantic period to the mid-Victorian period.