The last few decades have seen the emergence of a wealth of critical editions from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers. Brandie R. Siegfried's modernized edition of “Poems and Fancies” with “The Animal Parliament” by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), is surely one of the most eagerly anticipated. Siegfried's volume of Cavendish's first publication joins the growing canon of early modern women writers as part of the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe book series, and it does not disappoint.
Cavendish published twelve books in her lifetime, revising and reissuing half of them. She experimented liberally with genre and form but wrote only one poetry collection. That Cavendish revised it in three editions suggests its importance to her oeuvre, yet it has not previously appeared in a complete modern edition. Siegfried fills a lamentable void in Cavendish scholarship with this, her earliest work. Discussing a staggering range of topics from physics and mathematics to politics and ethics, her poetry includes dialogues between virtues, emotions, mythological beings, and personified objects and creatures. It narrates debates in dramatic scenes or answers questions posed within or across poems. In some, she likens differences of opinions, complaints, or conflicts to battles, hunts, or political discussions, while a few offer descriptions as a fitting poetic analogue to scientific observation. Her collection was, and remains, a rare endeavor uniting the reason of natural philosophy with the “fancies” of poetry.
Siegfried based her volume on Cavendish's final, 1668 edition and includes a detailed textual history of Poems and Fancies and a substantive contextualization of its themes and structures in her introduction, which also includes an informative summary of Cavendish's life, her influences, and an outline of her evolving understanding of science and philosophy. Two detailed appendixes then trace the revisions from the 1653 and 1664 editions, allowing readers to follow Cavendish's thinking with each amendment. One such change meant the loss of Cavendish's radical “spirited feminist segment,” but, as Siegfried notes, Cavendish may have considered the passage redundant in light of the “wittier and funnier” apologia in her dedication, “To All Noble and Worthy Ladies.” With measured editorial guidance, Siegfried walks us through such changes so that we might recognize the maturity of the final edition in which Cavendish adopts a “seasoned and far less apologetic authorial tone” (16). The volume is also exhaustively annotated and indexed, even including separate indexes for titles and first lines, allowing thankful readers to navigate the poems while discovering patterns in content and titling.
The result is a wonderfully coherent volume through which readers can finally experience the grand scope of Cavendish's poetic design. Several of Cavendish's poems have long appeared in anthologies and collections, including the familiar “Of Many Worlds in This World” and “A World in an Earring.” Others are the subject of study, including poems from part 1 on the nature of atoms, commonly gathered as “The Atomic Poems,” and two longer hunting poems, “The Hunting of the Hare” and “The Hunting of a Stag.” These alone have represented Cavendish's poetic innovation, as the majority of the 280 poems included here may be unfamiliar to those outside of Cavendish scholarship. Yet reading the collection in its entirety reveals the complexity of her poetic strategy; connections across poems and sections emerge, revealing a curious mind testing and retesting premises on mathematics and metaphysics, nature and forms of matter, animal intelligence and humanity's role in the micro- and macrocosm. The concepts that bourgeoning scientists studied and observed were the natural experiences that poets strove to capture, and Cavendish here accomplishes both.
Siegfried's textual annotations are an invaluable aide to students and scholars, offering both clarification and contextualization of the several classical and contemporary philosophical traditions informing Cavendish's thinking, like Epicurean atomism and its associations with algebraic geometry and her use and references to Euclid, Archimedes, and Lucretius. Siegfried might have included a more substantial discussion of Cavendish's innovative consideration of gender in her poetry, but what she included suffices given the scope of the volume. Cavendish's curiosity and stalwart belief in the power of “poems and fancies” to better convey reason was unrecognized for far too long; this volume brings that vision in its entirety to readers, and not before time.
