"Unboastful Bard": Originally Anonymous English Romantic Poetry Book Publication, 1770-1835

IN THE 1770S SIXTY PERCENT of all poetry books were published anonymously, but by the period's final decade from 1826 to 1835 only twenty-five percent were. As the reading public grew larger, and as improved printing technology allowed for the production of more and cheaper books, a few poets could become independent of patronage, could support themselves through their poetry, and could aspire to become professionals in a developing print culture. ¹ But to be a bad poet was as embarrassing and unrespectable as ever, especially for a gentleman or a lady. In the late eighteenth century this meant that, while young gentlemen or young ladies might write poetry, publishing secretly at first was usual because no one wanted a reputation as a laughably awkward poet. One could test one's poetic wings in print and see if others thought one was soaring magnificently astride Pegasus or rocking ridiculously aboard a hobby-horse. And if disappointed, an anonymous author could abandon hopes of poetic fame without enduring public humiliation.

Poets often found anonymous publication convenient and only gradually abandoned it under pressure from their publishers, who told them readers would not pay for most anonymous poetry. Nonetheless, although fearful modesty in publication remained a useful and accepted practice throughout the period, almost all poets whose work enjoyed a sustained success eventually revealed their authorship. Indeed, almost all the anonymous poetry that kept contemporary readers' attention and was published in three editions or more in at least three separate years was acknowledged by its authors. Despite what some critics may believe, the men and the women who wrote Romantic poetry differed little in their rates of anonymous publication. Apart from those writing political satire or panegyric, most poets chose anonymity out of fearful modesty, and emerged from it because of the marketing advantages in attaching their names to a poetic text.

This psychological motivation is shown in the surviving correspondence of the period's poets and in a fascinating meditation by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on poetic anonymity, "To the Author of Poems published at Bristol in September 1795." We may think of Romantic anonymity as a chrysalis for the poet's embryonic talent, which needs the collective warmth of the audience's approval so that the poet can confidently emerge in full Romantic flutter or flight. Thus, a study of anonymity shows that the Romantic poet-self requires some form of recognition from others and is only fully constituted by their reception. In "To the Author of Poems" Coleridge works out his understanding that the anonymous poet requires praise from others in order to be validated and so be encouraged to emerge from the obscurity anonymity affords, and the oblivion it guarantees. Only external acknowledgment can turn the private versifier into a public poet. Since Coleridge wanted this dramatic scene of recognition to be enacted for him, one can perhaps understand better why he did not sign his name to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800: William Wordsworth failed to receive him as a poet in the way that Coleridge felt was required.

The classical proverb that the poet is born, not made, thus acquires new meaning as poets stage such scenes of poetic recognition in their work. At the end of "I Stood Tip-Toe," the first of his 1817 Poems, John Keats asks expectantly, "Was there a Poet born?" He is expressing his self-conscious knowledge that readers must answer "yes" in order for his desire for poetic recognition to be fulfilled, and he has led his readers to that answer by having just imagined his own poetic engendering in the embrace of Cynthia and a shepherd:

Cynthia! I cannot tell the greater blisses,
That follow'd thine, and thy dear shepherd's kisses:
Was there a Poet born?—but now no more,
My wand'ring spirit must no further soar.—

(239-42) ²

Only the...