This article was downloaded by: [University of Florida]On: 04 October 2014, At: 19:06Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journalPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwst20

Daniel P. Watkinds. AnnaLetitia Barbauld andEighteenth-Century VisionaryPoetics. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins UP, 2012Paula R. BackscheiderPublished online: 04 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Paula R. Backscheider (2013) Daniel P. Watkinds. Anna LetitiaBarbauld and Eighteenth-Century Visionary Poetics. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUP, 2012, Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, 42:2, 209-213, DOI:10.1080/00497878.2013.747382

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2013.747382

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Fl

orid

a] a

t 19:

06 0

4 O

ctob

er 2

014

Women’s Studies, 42:209–213, 2013Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00497878.2013.747382

BOOK REVIEW

Daniel P. Watkinds. Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-CenturyVisionary Poetics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.

BY PAULA R. BACKSCHEIDER

Daniel Watkins’s Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-CenturyVisionary Poetics takes Poems (1773, 1792) for its subject. On firstpublication, the book of twenty-nine poems received exception-ally high praise, and the 1792 edition adds three hymns and themagisterial and moving Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on theRejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade. (Watkins does nothave to explain in detail the changes, mostly editorial, made inthe 1792 edition, because William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraftdid so in The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld.) It is rare for anentire book to be devoted to a woman writer, and even morerare for a critical book to be devoted to a single text by anywriter, even a long-canonized male writer. Watkins’s book, then,is a sign of the recognition of Barbauld’s importance and also ofthe mature stabilization of the field of feminist studies. Barbauldhas arrived, and Watkins’s book simply underscores this fact. Well-edited and accessible editions of her poems, substantial inclusionin the best anthologies (even of her long Eighteen Hundred andEleven), and the authoritative biography, Anna Letitia Barbauld:Voice of the Enlightenment by William McCarthy, bring her close tothe tiny group set apart from all other long eighteenth-centurywomen writers: Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen.

In an unusual strategy, Watkins calls attention to the factthat he will draw on two influential critic-theorists. Using NeilFraistat’s method in The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collectionsof Romantic Poetry, Watkins treats the poems in Barbauld’s Poems asrelated, even interlocked, expressions. Fraistat argued that someRomantic poets composed “coherent volumes from seeminglydisparate poems that harmonize on a sophisticated level” (4).Watkins constructs a narrative from Barbauld’s poems that revealsher visionary belief in the reforming and redemptive power of

209

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Fl

orid

a] a

t 19:

06 0

4 O

ctob

er 2

014

210 Paula R. Backscheider

love, sympathy, and virtue and that manages to forge spiritualand material life into a unified whole. In the later poems, hesees Barbauld accepting “the demands of prophecy” and recog-nizing “the terrible power that comes with prophetic vision” (131).Here and elsewhere, he seems to be pointing toward her EighteenHundred and Eleven, the great prophetic poem that destroyed herpopularity. In fact, many readers will anticipate a final chapter onthis poem and be disappointed.

Continuously drawing upon Joe Wittreich’s respected workon the visionary poetry of John Milton and William Blake, Watkinstests Barbauld and identifies similarities to and differences fromthe great English male visionary poets’ work. For example, hepoints out that Spenser, Milton, and Wordsworth “(as well asVirgil), all of whom wrote visionary poetry only after having pre-pared themselves through lengthy apprenticeships in which theygathered the poetic tools needed for visionary expression.” Herehe is justifying the fact that her reflections on writing begin, in hisinterpretation, with the twelfth poem in the book, The Origin ofSong-Writing . Thus, this group is “interlude,” not located to “pre-cede visionary expression” (116). Unfortunately, poems earlierin the book are also about writing and form a somewhat differ-ent narrative with themes of central importance in the writing ofwomen poets. For example, The Invitation: To Miss B∗∗∗∗∗ employsthe language of cavalier love poems (“Come live with me, and bemy love”) to make a major statement about the highest aspirationsof the poet. “The Muse invites, my Delia haste away,” she writes.Moving to a vision of a better politic, she writes,

How bright the scene to fancy’s eye appears,Thro’ the long perspective of distant years,When this, this little group their country callsFrom academic shades and learned halls,To fix her laws, her spirit to sustain,And light up glory thro’ her wide domain!

In various ways, women writers before and contemporaneouswith Barbauld wrote visionary texts. More than for eighteenth-century male poets, this stance was nearly habitual, and Barbauld’spoems, written in a variety of forms, are firmly within that tra-dition. For instance, from Anne Finch forward they used fables,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Fl

orid

a] a

t 19:

06 0

4 O

ctob

er 2

014

Book Review 211

as Barbauld does in The Mouse’s Petition, and their employmentof the pastoral mode for this purpose was exceptionally creative.Watkins recognizes its importance for her themes, but he is nottruly comfortable with pastoral, sometimes accusing Barbauld of“retreating” into it and often using it as a catch-all category ratherthan sorting the kinds of poetry in which the mode is employed.The next step toward maturity of criticism of women’s work willcome when there is mastery of both male and female bodies ofcriticism. From the time of the publication of Ann Messenger’sPastoral Tradition and the Female Talent: Studies in Augustan Poetry(1999) and Annibel Patterson’s Pastoral and Ideology (1987), forinstance, women critics have contributed sophisticated studiesof women’s revisionary uses of the pastoral and, indeed, so hasMichael McKeon.

Watkins is much better at relating Barbauld’s epigraphs totheir classical sources than he is at working with the Britishpoets who are her true contexts. For example, he shortchangesJames Thomson and does not mention Elizabeth Carter, whose ToWisdom was well known partly because it was published in SamuelRichardson’s Clarissa rather notoriously without her permission.Comparing this poem with Barbauld’s To Wisdom (discussedon 114–16) would have contributed a needed context. Women ofher generation and earlier were deeply engaged in philosophicalthinking, especially as it encouraged a fulfilling, contented life,and Barbauld wrote within this tradition in which Carter was a cen-tral figure. Again, women critics including Harriet Guest (SmallChange: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 [2000]) and myselfhave written detailed studies of this tradition. This is not to say thatWatkins’s work with classical texts is not valuable; not only doesit illuminate Barbauld’s deep, wide learning but it brings to thefore some of her most important themes, such as how difficult lifeis under an unenlightened government. He calls the epigraphs“guiding” and indeed seems a little adrift with poems like the sixSongs that lack them (125).

Given Watkins’s earlier work, I expected more analysis ofBarbauld’s poetics. He identifies his work with demonstrations ofthe evidence of the careful thinker and intellectually gifted per-son in McCarthy’s biography and Daniel White’s Early Romanticismand Religious Dissent, and sometimes this project and attentionto craftsmanship come together. He is at his best in working

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Fl

orid

a] a

t 19:

06 0

4 O

ctob

er 2

014

212 Paula R. Backscheider

with the group of five poems that he categorizes as a “cluster ofsatires and pastoral” that move toward “smaller” subjects (chap-ter four); this chapter effectively validates working with groupsof poems that show her purpose to be setting out “principles,or values, that might serve as a guiding spirit in a meaningfullife” (105) within a unified book of poems. Other excellent sec-tions are those relating Summer Evening’s Meditation and Epistle toWilberforce through formal characteristics (186ff.), and in explain-ing Barbauld’s Nonconformist dilemma stemming from “an ide-alism that recognizes the freedom of the mind and realism thatrecognizes the political opposition to free thought” (44). But onewould never know that Poems includes a virtuoso display of poeticexcellence in blank verse, heroic couplets, quatrains with severalunusual metrical schemes, sextains, hymns that range from classi-cal ode to simple congregational forms, and philosophical verseessays. Selection of genre was a major tactic of women writers, apolitical decision. Her diction ranges from formal, elevated speechto lyrical to mildly satirical as in The Groans of the Tankard, whichis written from its point of view. How deeply Miltonic A SummerEvening’s Meditation is also passes without comment and mighthave reinforced Wittreich’s usefulness. Although Barbauld hadpublished a few important poems earlier, Poems is her first book,and both the reflections and the visionary drive of her poems seemmore self-assured and even audacious than Watkins recognizes.She is saturating this concluding poem with Miltonic echoes butrevising his visionary poems such as L’Allegro and parts of ParadiseLost while blending the poetry of contemplation and peace writtenby women (McCarthy and Kraft mention Anne Finch’s NocturnalReverie).

We all know that Milton and Blake were great poets whospoke with beauty and profundity in many tones and styles.If Barbauld is to stand with Wittreich’s visionaries, her poeticsneeds comment. For instance, after treating Delia: An Elegy (aloose imitation of Tibullus’s Elegy1) and Ovid to his Wife in detail,Watkins turns to a new group of poems that begin with To a Lady,with some painted flowers. The contrasts in tone, imagery, and syntaxcould not be greater as the beautifully lyrical poem opens:

Flowers to the fair: To you these flowers I bring,And strive to greet you with an earlier spring.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Fl

orid

a] a

t 19:

06 0

4 O

ctob

er 2

014

Book Review 213

Flowers sweet, and gay, and delicate like you;Emblems of innocence and beauty too.With flowers the Graces bind their yellow hair,And flowery wreaths consenting lovers wear.Flowers, the sole luxury which nature knew,In Eden’s pure and guiltless garden grew.

Because Watkins is working at the level of content with the goal offorging the poems into a narrative of Barbauld’s mind, commit-ments, and production of visionary poetry, there is no commenton this movement. He does not pick up Barbauld’s echo ofTibullus’s “The simple knot shall bind her gather’d hair” in lock-ing the transition to “the Graces bind their yellow hair” (Delia wasbelieved to be blonde). To many eighteenth-century women poets,Tibullus was the great poet of love and war (the classical subjectsof elegies, which Watkins does not recognize), and Barbauld con-tinues that theme, too, as the employment of the oak, yew, andpine (“The tougher yew repels invading foes”) contrasts to theflowers “born for pleasure and delight alone”). Compared to theworld of intrigue, politics, and banishment invoked in the refer-ence to the worlds of Tibullus and Ovid, the reference to Edencompletes a shift in worlds. Watkins explains well that these arepainted flowers and therefore bring together poetry and painting.He categorizes the poem as pastoral when in fact it belongs to thegenre of the friendship poem with its particularly rich tradition ofekphrasis and gift giving. Leaving Delia and Ovid’s wife, the shiftthen is toward beloved English women who personify the centeredlife and a circling back to earlier poems such as To Mrs. P[riestley]With some Drawing of Birds and Insects.

Watkins’s book is valuable; it signals an advance in criticalwriting about women’s texts, and his application of Fraistat isstimulating and demonstrates a valuable analytical tool. It alsoreveals how many narratives are yet to be recognized in women’sbest work.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f Fl

orid

a] a

t 19:

06 0

4 O

ctob

er 2

014