Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-Century Visionary Poetics

5 Reflections on Writing

chapter Five Reflections on Writing In the cluster of poems that follows on “To Wisdom”—“The Origin of SongWriting ,” “Songs,” “Delia,” and “Ovid to His Wife”—Barbauld faces directly the problem of writing in an effort to determine the extent to which she is capable of creating a visionary poetry built on the principles set out in the previous poems. She also gathers up several major themes and modes of poetic expression from the earlier sections of the volume as if to test them against the deeper understanding that she has begun to develop across the range of previous poems. Finally, the poems here are marked by an elegiac tone that Barbauld constructs to ensure that her themes are not simply stated but also subjected to reflection. Thus, while her themes and modes are familiar—love, pastoral— her conception of the visionary is more sophisticated and nuanced than before. That Barbauld would pause to reflect on the act of writing this far into the volume may at first seem to be a clumsy poetic move, insofar as one might expect that such reflection would precede visionary expression. Certainly the tradition of visionary writing prior to Barbauld suggests that she is not following the expected and necessary path toward becoming a visionary poet. To glimpse the unconventional turn that she takes in this cluster of poems, one need only consider the poetic trajectories of (say) Spenser, Milton, and Wordsworth (as well as Virgil), all of whom wrote visionary poetry only after having prepared themselves through lengthy apprenticeships in which they gathered the poetic tools needed for visionary expression. But within the context of Poems, this interlude of poetic self-reflection is perfectly suited to Barbauld’s visionary purposes. After all, her understanding of vision is inextricably tied to her understanding of the vital necessity of selfreflection . Just as her excursions into pastoral idealism provide a reflective space for meditating on the nature of idealism in relation to hard experience, so her reflection on writing serves as a check against becoming too comfortable and uncritical in her poetic endeavor. Barbauld addresses “The Origin of Song-Writing” to her brother, John Aikin, who, in 1772, had published a well-received volume entitled Essays on SongWriting , a collection of essays and various lyric poems (including several by 118 Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-Century Visionary Poetics Barbauld) that, among other things, sought to intervene in contemporary discussions about literary taste. As McCarthy notes of the collection, “The essays were to demonstrate literary taste and sensibility and also to assert some moderately original views—mainly the view that modern pastoral and love lyrics (‘songs’) deserve the same critical care and attention long lavished on ancient epic and tragedy” (106–7). Barbauld’s reference to her brother’s work helps to explain her own engagement with the pastoral genre in particular and the song in general as serious modes of poetic expression—or at least modes of expression that can be reimagined to serve serious poetic aims. For example, in his “Essay on Song-Writing in General,” Aikin remarks: The term song may therefore be considered in a double sense—if the idea of music prevails, it signifies no more than a set of words calculated for adaptation to a tune: if poetry be the principle object, it is a species of poetical composition regulated by peculiar laws, and susceptible of a certain definition; still however retaining so much of the musical idea as to make it an essential circumstance, that by a regularly returning measure it be capable of being set to a tune. A song, as a poetical composition, may be defined, [as] a short piece, divided into returning portions of measure, and formed upon a single incident, thought, or sentiment. (10) In the following essay, he then ties this idea of songwriting to pastoral, making explicit that British pastoral is a fiction rather than a form of expression that is natural to British culture. As he puts it: Pastoral Poetry is a native of happier climates, where the face of nature, and the manners of the people are widely different from those of our northern regions. What is reality on the soft Arcadian and Sicilian plains, is all fiction here; and though by reading we may be so familiarized to these imaginary scenes as to acquire a sort of natural taste for them, yet, like the fine fruits of the south, they will never be so far naturalized to the soil, as to...