The Excluded Middle

The literary ecology of Parnassus requires shrubs and saplings as well as mighty oaks. Recent scholarship has had much to say about major poets and not a little about small poets. But poets of middle stature—however vital to the circulation of ideas, genres, books, money, and fame—do not cut much of a figure in high-culture or low-culture studies of literature. It is therefore a good thing to see a major press issuing a book on a writer such as Anna Seward.

Anna Seward wrote mannered verse. Her simple forms overlaid with elaborately decorative syntax and diction leave an impression not unlike the busy interiors of Robert Adam or the marquetry furniture of Hepplewhite and Sheraton: at once powerful and fragile, they suited the refined tastes of a lateclassical age tipping over into romantic atavism. George Romney’s portrait of Seward as a black-robed priestess in a laureled turban conveys a similar notion of edgy decorousness.

Claudia Thomas Kairoff argues that Seward has been unjustly neglected because her poetry does not fit neatly into received categories: “It is tempting to describe Seward as marginal owing to her liminal status at the close of one literary period as another opened. If she is marginal, however, that marginality increases her significance” (3). But how likely is it, really, that presenting Seward as a belated-Augustan-pre-Romantic will lend her the status of a “major” writer? (3). Why not argue that Seward’s importance lay in being a “middling” author, a mediator, neither oak nor shrub?

A case could be made that Anna Seward’s verse was a conduit by which eighteenth-century poetics was carried into the nineteenth. Kairoff seems to close down this possibility, arguing that for Walter Scott, Seward’s Augustan predilections “represented a literary era now as seemingly ‘ancient’ as that of the incomprehensible Elizabethan [Spenser] she deplored” (21). But such was not the case. When Scott edited the three volumes of Seward’s Poetical Works in 1810, the two most admired living poets were Samuel Rogers and Thomas Campbell, masters of the heroic couplet. The Pope controversy of the 1820s demonstrated that “Augustan” poetics still had many defenders, Byron among them.

In Scott’s view, what rendered Seward out of date was not her Augustan belatedness, but her cultivation of modish stylishness. “There is a fashion in poetry, which, without increasing or diminishing the real value of materials moulded upon it, does wonders in facilitating its currency, while it has novelty, and is often found to impede its reception when the mode has passed away.”¹ Her “splendour of language,” “bold personification,” “inversion and the use of compound epithets,” were characteristic of the lyric and descriptive poetry of the 1780s and 90s. Such sentimental and romantic excess was what Wordsworth was reacting against when, in the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads, he called for a return to “simple and unelaborated expressions.”²

Scott’s remarks link Seward to her peers William Hayley and Erasmus Darwin, eminently respectable poets whose reputations had gone into steep decline as wartime tastes in poetry had veered back toward simplicity. When in the same year Scott described Seward’s verse as “absolutely execrable” in a letter to Joanna Baillie, one may suspect that he had a different comparison in mind, classifying her effusions with the newspaper verse of her imitators Robert Merry, Mary Robinson, and Hannah Cowley. The Della Cruscans’ misappropriation of Miltonic sublimity for purposes of diurnal self-flattery had been roundly abused by Scott’s critical ally William Gifford in The Baviad (1791). For whatever reason, by 1810 Seward’s stock had certainly fallen; writing to her publisher Constable, John Murray warned, “It would be hazardous to offer any important sum for her works, either published or ante-posthumous.”³

But one must not lose sight of the forest for the trees. Scott and Gifford notwithstanding, the-language-of-the-age-is-never-the-language-of-poetry doctrine embraced by Seward’s contemporaries had a...