-
4 Experimenting with Genre
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
c h a p t e r f o u r Experimenting with Genre 1212 The Long and the Short of It In chapter 3 I examined how Romantic-era British women poets worked with a single poetic genre, the sonnet, and I approached that genre “vertically,” looking down through the interrelated layers of texts to explore the intertextual conversation among the poets that they reveal. In this chapter, by contrast, I take more of a horizontal approach to survey a broader selection of poets and genres. With each of these subsets, though, it is still possible to pursue the same sort of detailed vertical analysis I have offered of the sonnets. Each of these sets of generically related poems likewise reveals intertextual conversations among authors who were exploring, modifying, and reinventing those individual genres and subgenres. Although I am primarily concerned with poetry written by women, these conversations in print inevitably involve both female and male authors, as well as readers of both sexes. Moreover, even when individual poems ostensibly identify a single or limited target audience (by explicitly addressing or otherwise naming a recipient), the formal act of publishing the poems converts these ostensibly private utterances into very public documents in which the poet knowingly both acknowledges and engages a much wider audience. This section’s title suggests one criterion that has governed my selection of poems here: their length. The first part of the chapter treats poems that are for the most part “long” poems. Among these, I begin with a group that I describe as poems of social commitment, poems that engage clearly and deliberately with pressing social and political issues and that are in one way or another polemical in nature (for example , the several poems about slavery and abolition with which I begin). A second category of “long” poems is that of long verse narratives that are neither polemical nor particularly concerned with social or political issues but rather are variations on the tradition of the sentimental verse romance. The last part of the chapter takes up Experimenting with Genre 153 poems that are comparatively “shorter”; these are occasional poems, and the ones I consider here are primarily elegiac in nature. I divide these into two groups, the first consisting of commemorative or memorial poems on public figures and composed on or for public occasions. The second group of poems memorialize more immediately private, personal losses, often of children. The rhetoric of this second set differs from that of the poems on more publicly ostentatious figures in the manner in which the poets make personal loss “public” by creating a shared intimacy among the members of the extended rhetorical families that they create in print. Even the necessarily incomplete picture that emerges from the cursory overview that can be achieved in a single chapter demonstrates that the women poets of the Romantic era followed the lead of their eighteenth-century predecessors in experimenting with the limits of genre, revising, recombining, and restyling generic conventions and creating from these diverse materials new forms, new vehicles, that better suited the voices that they were discovering at the dawn of the modern era. Poetry of Social Commitment By 1800, British women poets had made their very substantial presence felt in the market for published poetry, whether their efforts resulted in commercial, for-profit publications like those of Robinson, Smith, and Seward or whether their books were issued by subscription for the more modest and localized benefit of the individual poets. It had become obvious by 1800 that a market existed for both types of books, and it is therefore little surprise that many women writers who published during the next several decades began their writing careers, as Amelia Opie, Barbara Hofland , and Sydney Owenson did, by first publishing one or more volumes of poetry before turning to the generally more lucrative market of prose fiction. Moreover, those decades witnessed the publication of numerous extended narrative poems that constitute a variety of fiction in verse that would culminate most notably in 1857 in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel in blank verse, Aurora Leigh, often regarded as her magnum opus. In that remarkable tale about the literary career of a woman writer, Barrett Browning examined the responsibilities of the writer both to her art and to the broader social and political worlds, raising the question of the place of women in public life and institutions. Aurora Leigh represents an important stage in the development of a variety of poetry...