Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-Century Visionary Poetics

Conclusion

Conclusion At the conclusion of Visionary Poetics, Joseph Wittreich remarks that “for Blake and for the other Romantics, Milton is a type of the renovator mundi, a liberator rather than an oppressor, who, like other such figures, appears under a number of guises—as Corrector, Reparator, Reformator. Milton, for these poets, is the great prophet who stands between the ancient and the modern world” (214). This statement calls to mind two important considerations bearing on the study of eighteenth-century women’s poetry in general and the poetry of Barbauld in particular. First, Wittreich’s implication that there is a gap in the writing of visionary poetry between the periods of Milton and Blake needs to be reconsidered in the light of recent studies on women poets of the eighteenth century; as I have tried to show, almost twenty years before Blake began his visionary project, Barbauld (among others) had developed a systematic and sophisticated visionary poetics. Second, while Barbauld certainly knew the work of Milton, as William McCarthy makes clear and as various allusions in her own poetry show, she does not easily fit within a Miltonic line of vision. Barbauld draws from multiple sources, including Milton, and shapes these sources to fit her own purposes. Not only do her purposes (arguably) differ from Milton’s but her poetic strategies and conclusions about how to achieve salvation and liberty depart markedly from the strategies deployed by Milton before her and Blake afterward. Barbauld does not engage in any sustained way with Milton ’s vision in an effort to correct it; Milton is but one of many sources—classical and Christian—on whom she draws in mapping out her vision for eighteenthcentury Britain. Her visionary poetics, that is, derives from broad and diverse sets of cultural interest rather than from a singular set of literary engagements. The result is a poetry that needs to be examined within contexts beyond those that inform the conventional understanding of British visionary poetics. As an expression of the reach and depth of the visionary imagination, Barbauld ’s Poems is perhaps the most important poetic document of the later eighteenth century. Her poetic interests embrace various eighteenth-century preoccupations with history and politics, speculative philosophy, and religious dissent; she also looks beyond the interests of her own day, pushing back into ancient literary history for the purpose of bringing earlier literary views to bear 196 Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-Century Visionary Poetics on contemporary social relations, and she appropriates Milton and biblical writings and ideas when they suit her visionary purposes. Drawing upon epic, satire, lyric, hymns, songs, pastoral, and other modes of poetic expression, she constructs over the course of the volume a coherent and compelling visionary statement about the most important and durable principles of human experience and about how to bring these principles to bear on the public world in such a way as to transform it. Her visionary reach takes in personal life and public life, the present and the past, and the spiritual and secular dimensions of the human situation, which she interweaves to demonstrate the singular reality of experience that, under the pressure of contemporary British history, has become divided and corrupted to the point of collapse but that can be remade along the lines of humane and just principles. While the early reception of Poems was largely positive, Barbauld’s good reputation became tainted over time as readers and critics came to understand more fully the implications of her visionary charge to the public, sketched in An Epistle to William Wilberforce, then stated explicitly and in detail twenty years later in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. These poems explicitly set out the political meaning of her pacifist vision. However, other poems in the volume lay the foundation for the political conclusions she ultimately arrives at, beginning , for instance, with “Corsica,” which acknowledges that in interpreting the Corsican nationalist movement she had “read the book of destiny amiss” and concludes with her retreat into the “freedom of the mind.” In subsequent poems , she explores with great patience and in considerable detail the possibility of situating oneself meaningfully in the world so as to preserve one’s personal integrity, and at the same time she shows how structural transformation of the world might be possible. Over the course of the volume, she engages with classical and contemporary traditions of literary expression, meditates on the ways of science and the limitations and possibilities of religion, considers the role of friendship in...