Notes
Notes Introduction 1. See especially Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry; Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company; Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse; and Joseph A. Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse. 2. For a brief recognition of Leapor’s use of dreams as a framework in many of her poems, see Susan Goulding, “Reading ‘Mira’s Will,’” 78. 3. Some of the later work of Joanna Baillie also reflects an interest in visionary poetics. She explores the operations of vision in a series of narrative poems not just in Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters but also, two years later, in a volume that she edited entitled A Collection of Poems, in which she gathers poems by others, many of whom were interested in the power of vision. Note, for example, the concluding lines in the sonnet about Hannibal (“At Lake Thrasymenus”), written by Charles Johnston: But what was thy reward? care, labour, war Defeat, and exile, a self-hasten’d end— Enough;—for not confin’d to life, but far Beyond, can minds like thine their vision send, And see, tho’ none beside, the ascending star Of glory, which their memories shall attend. (127) 4. In dating the poem, I rely on a list of poems included in Robinson’s Memoirs that, she says, were written between December 1799 and December 1800. See Robinson , Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, 2:262. 5. In talking about the visionary tradition in general, Wittreich makes a point that is applicable to Blake: “If epic articulates a new stage of consciousness, prophecy is more ambitious still, attempting to bring man to the highest peak of consciousness that is possible, its objective being not to equip man to live in an advancing state of civilization but to enable man to enter the heavenly Jerusalem” (“‘A Poet Amongst Poets’” 104). 6. One notable exception to this claim is Anne Bannerman, whose work I discuss in the next section of the introduction. 206 Notes to Pages 4–21 7. Stephen C. Behrendt’s important recent study, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community, examines books rather than individual poems, though his critical interest is not centered on the practical and theoretical significance of the poetic volume. 8. Wolfson’s comment about Hemans helps to make the point that the gender dynamic of women’s writing is as much a critical construct as a product of authorial agency: “Before she had been hailed (not without her bid) into the cult of the ‘feminine,’ the gender of Hemans’s pen was less settled. She baffled the British Review’s reader with her unsigned Modern Greece (1817), its ‘high polish’ and ‘classical ’ modeling seeming ‘the production of an academical, and certainly not a female, pen’” (77). 9. For a discussion of these two poems, and of Barbauld’s general views on gender, see Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire, 215–30. 10. For a helpful and informative article on the Della Cruscans, see Edward E. Bostetter, “The Original Della Cruscans and the Florence Miscellany,” 277–300. 11. The best work to date on Hands’s volume is Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance , 186–208. For a helpful recent study of Hands, see Cynthia Dereli, “In Search of a Poet.” 12. Achitophel sees Amnon as an obstacle to the crown: “Th’ ambitious Prince [Achitophel], resolv’d/At once t’ avenge his sister, and remove/An obstacle betwixt him and the crown” (34). 13. For a helpful study of Hands’s writing strategies, see Carolyn Steedman, “Poetical Maids and Cooks Who Wrote.” 14. On matters of sexual orientation, see “An Epistle” (91–92), which is explicitly lesbian in its expressions of desire: “Let love-sick nymphs their faithful shepherds prove,/Maria’s friendship’s more to me than love” (91); “When I walk forth to take the morning air,/I quickly to some rising hill repair,/Then sigh to you, and languish with desire” (91); “’Tis you, Maria, and ’tis only you,/That can the wonted face of things renew:/Come to my groves” (92). 15. Very little has been written about this important poet. But see Ashley Miller, “Obscurity and Affect in Anne Bannerman’s ‘The Dark Ladie’”; Adriana Craciun, “Romantic Spinstrelsy”; Diane Long Hoeveler, “Gendering the Scottish Ballad”; and Andrew Elfenbein, “Lesbian and Romantic Genius.” 16. My discussion here is based on a hardcopy of Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, which places the engraving of The Prophecy of Merlin in the front of the volume. In two online versions...
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