Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre

Chapter Two: Anne Finch and What Women Wrote

c h a p t e r t w o Anne Finch and What Women Wrote To whom English verse is under greater obligation than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered. — w i l l i a m w o r d s w o r t h Although earning the right to be identified as a poet is something like becoming recognized as a novelist or a playwright, writing poetry is not like writing a novel or a play—not now and especially not in the eighteenth century. Poetry has always been associated with the expression of individual feeling, often strong and personal feeling. In the eighteenth century it was sacred ground—the field on which the nation’s claim to artistic equality with the Greeks, the Romans, and the French would be contested. Poetry was also written to participate in the most serious social and political debates and to express, and therefore propagate and teach, philosophical arguments. Additionally, writing extempore poetry was a fashionable social activity that captured transitory feelings and shared, ordinary events. Thus, writing poetry could seem both accessible and impossible. Although it has seldom been remarked upon, possessors of special talents usually produce both pieces in the most respected verse forms that show the highest ambition and polish and also pieces in ragged rhythm that are whipped off to express a transitory idea to amuse others or themselves. Because the eighteenth century was a time of widespread public appreciation of and active practice in writing poetry, more of every kind of poetry found its way into print and enriches the landscape. Anne Finch and What Women Wrote 29 Today poetry, when thought of at all, is still crowned, as it has been from the beginning of literary history, ‘‘the highest form of human expression.’’∞ The esteem and importance of poetry is everywhere recorded. As the call for world superiority in ‘‘arts and arms’’ echoed in Great Britain, writers referred to poetry as ‘‘the language of the gods,’’ and Joseph Addison even demanded the scrutiny of poetry on tombstones. In narrating the life of one of the many women writers who surrendered some of her poetic ambitions, Stuart Curran writes, ‘‘Though she soon saw that the means to financial independence lay in prose, [Charlotte] Smith’s sense of her genteel heritage and her claims to artistry never allowed her to abandon a commitment to poetry’’(Curran, xxii–xxiii, emphasis mine). In this chapter I begin to sketch a landscape broad and detailed enough to include women and, in a variety of ways, to answer the question, What did women write? In the first section I sketch some of the most influential aspects of their milieu, including the male poets they admired, and in the second I focus on the popular rather than the most canonical forms of poetry, specifically occasional poems, fables, pastoral dialogues, and theater verse. Finch becomes a centerpiece, for she represents the possibility of a life as a poet for a women in the first quarter of the century and what such a vocation or career might look like. In the third section I extend my exploration of the conception of a career through poems on poetry. The work of the women featured in this chapter—Mary Savage , Mary Chudleigh, Anne Finch, Sarah Fyge Egerton—undermines the familiar ‘‘hoary’’ ‘‘assumptions and prejudices’’ about women poets: that they lack high ambition, put emotion before form, ‘‘are likely to be indifferent technicians,’’ and ‘‘imitate closely the poetic productions of men.’’≤ In the final section, I focus on Finch’s poem The Spleen, one of the favorite and most reprinted poems by an eighteenth-century woman, in order to extend understanding of the world in which these women were writing and the legacy they believed they were leaving. Because this poem is a Pindaric ode, perhaps the most frequently written form in the century but also one of the most canonical, and both personal, like many of the poems discussed in this chapter, and topical, like those in the next, it is a suitable transition to chapter three. The Social and the Formal Of all literary forms, poetry was the most respectable for women to write. They wrote for their private amusement, and cultured women were expected to be able towriteapolishedverse,justastheywereexpectedtodanceandsketch.WhatJean Mallinson says of Anne Finch could be said of dozens of other women: ‘‘Out of the [18.225.31.159] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 06:33 GMT...