The Poetics of Unoriginality: The Case of Lucretia Davidson

More than thirty years ago, Nina Baym demonstrated that long-standing scholarly measures of literary achievement, such as originality and innovativeness, directly enabled the exclusion of women-authored literary texts from classroom study and critical attention. As Baym argued, the frequent conventionality and generic predictability of such texts have long been received as evidence of their lesser literary value and unsuitability for scholarly consideration (125–32). Following this foundational assertion, such critics as Judith Fetterley and Susan K. Harris called for the creation of new modes of literary evaluation suited to the particular features of nineteenth-century US women’s literature and capable of illuminating the contexts that informed this characteristic conventionality. As anyone familiar with the field knows, the last several decades have seen the publication of innumerable important studies that have sought to do this work, attending in particular to nineteenth-century fiction. More recently, this endeavor has turned to the work of women poets from the period, whose formulaic conventionality rendered their work seemingly opaque and resistant to analysis, an opinion voiced by Cheryl Walker in an early study: “The problem,” she wrote, is that “we don’t know how to read their poems” (Nightingale’s Burden 1). Poetic conventionality has thus become the active subject of recent scholarly inquiry, as with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s analysis of the aesthetics that underlie the “formulaic tropes or tripping rhymes” often characteristic of women’s verse (495). Eliza Richards has likewise argued that the deliberate replication of stock poetic tropes and forms enabled nineteenth-century women poets to secure patronage, networks of circulation, and readership. Similarly, Angela Sorby has examined the contributions of poetic convention to pedagogic instruction and classroom exercises of recitation.

This essay seeks to contribute to this important disciplinary endeavor by demonstrating the broader scope and uses of poetic conventionality, which these critics have shown to be instrumental in helping nineteenth-century women poets to secure standing in the public sphere of the literary marketplace. Women writers’ use of poetic convention, however, enabled more than just advantageous positioning in the market: the deliberate use of poetic convention, this essay aims to show, could also prove beneficial in more personal, domestic matters, specifically by teaching young female poets the conventions and social expectations of adulthood. To be sure, exercises in rhetorical convention were a regular feature of nineteenth-century education, with students commonly required to write in imitation of a particular style, a task designed to help them cultivate literary mastery and discernment.¹ The poetry of Lucretia Davidson, a prolific poet who died of consumption in 1825 at the age of sixteen and who achieved remarkable posthumous renown, suggests that the replication of established poetic models could also enable girls to prepare for the familial, domestic responsibilities they would be expected to assume as adults.

An avid amateur poet, Davidson disavowed any desire for publication, declining even to show her work to family, and her poems were thus composed without an eye toward securing readership or public fame. Furthermore, few female poets were as unapologetically, even deliberately, conventional as she, and even the most receptive feminist critic has had to concede that Davidson’s poetry is patently “derivative,” a circumstance that has likely contributed to Davidson’s continuing invisibility even within the field of scholars studying nineteenth-century US women poets.² Written when she was between the ages of eleven and sixteen, her poems often exhibit the imitative qualities of the student copyist who deliberately attempts to reproduce the style, forms, and characteristic phrasings of a mature master, as with her numerous verses in the distinctive Scottish brogue of Robert Burns. Her poems exhibit no visible interest in formal or thematic experimentation, and they seldom diverge from standard poetic phrasings and tropes, describing, for instance, a deceased child as an angel and intoning the moralistic pieties typical of sentimental verse. In this respect Davidson fits neatly within the tradition of the Poetess, a figure Virginia Jackson and Eliza Richards have described as deliberately reproducing preexisting, recognizable poetic styles and forms. But Davidson’s poetry often exceeds the boundaries of mere poetic...