“Under the subtle wreath”: Louise Bogan, Felicia Hemans, and Petrarchan Poetics

Louise Bogan joked that in a former life she had been “Felicia Hemans.” A lush Romantic and an austere Modernist, Hemans and Bogan appear polar opposites, yet these learned women poets shared a laureate poetics of Love and Fame. Hemans alludes directly to Petrarch’s laureate triumph in “The Magic Glass”; in poetry and prose she portrays the difficult laureateships of Sappho and Tasso. Both Hemans and Bogan seemed laureates to their contemporaries and successors, yet both found laurels an ambiguous donnée, Bogan a “burden” among flowers, Hemans a fiery crown for the likes of “the Bride of the Greek Isle.” Petrarch gained his laurels in a formal triumph at Rome, a scene mandating abjuration and entailing defeat. His I trionfi enacted triumph and its reversals in a sequence mounting from Love to Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. Bogan’s laurels were similarly fugual, a “subtle wreath” combining “the line of feeling” of “sentimental” women’s poetry with “the line of thought” in masculine Metaphysical Modernism. The poems of Bogan and Hemans that most vex critics – Bogan’s life-denying “Henceforth, from the Mind,” Hemans’s fame-abjuring “Corinne at the Capitol” – read differently as Petrarchan triumphs, that is, as abjurations signaling fresh triumphs to come

The bowl of liberty: Felicia Hemans and the Romantic Mediterranean.

From Britain's Spanish campaign against Napoleon in 1808 to Byron's death in 1824, British poets of all political persuasions devoted their attention to European republicanism and its post-war prospects. Their debate took as its political and cultural arena the Mediterranean, present and past. In critically inflected laureate verse, Felicia Hemans made an early, well-read, and wide-ranging contribution to this debate. To read Hemans's Mediterranean project and the writing that surrounds it, this study constructs with a new comprehensiveness Romanticism's "Mediterranean text." That text includes Britain's imperialist involvement in the basin sea; Spain's legends of a Moorish frontier; the political and historical writings of Gibbon, Schiller, Coleridge, Sismondi, and others; Byron's Orientalism; the Italianate aesthetics and poetics of Milton, Roscoe, and Stael; and the religious revisionism of radicals like Shelley and Tories like Milman and Hemans. This study inflects the greater Mediterranean "text" in its materialist and feminist dimensions and for its figural and rhetorical form. In so doing, it re-theorizes in feminist ways the aesthetic of the beautiful, the role of the laureate, and the figuration of consciousness that has informed recent Romantic study. Influenced by Italianate writers and influencing Byron, Hemans figured resistance to imperial designs as both republican and feminine. She structured her volumes to recast political and cultural history as a feminist "Risorgimento" that might sanction the interests of women and "the obscure." She experimented also with a feminine religious re-establishment that, as in Shelley's work, syncretized Western and Eastern practices. Both Victorian culture and contemporary criticism have found Hemans's later lyrics more approachable than her lengthy and programmatic early work. In elucidating that early work, this study aims also to provide cultural and historical context for those later lyrics. For readers interested in Hemans and Romantic women poets, this work offers an account of her career from its intellectual origins in Liverpool's Athenaeum to its dispersal in Anglo-American sentimental culture.PhDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103676/1/9332173.pdfDescription of 9332173.pdf : Restricted to UM users only

“‘The Talking Demon’: Liberty and Liberal Ideologies on the 1820s British Stage”

Il saggio prende in esame una porzione finora relativamente poco studiata della drammaturgia romantica in ambito britannico. Si occupa, cioè, della ricca produzione di opere tragiche improntate ad ideali liberali, ovvero radicati nell’ideologia Whig e legati alle richieste sempre più pressanti di riforme politiche e parlamentari nella Gran Bretagna degli anni 1820. Inoltre, l’articolo approfondisce come queste opere evochino, al tempo stesso, collegamenti espliciti con i principi ispiratori dei movimenti libertari e costituzionali che, nello stesso periodo, percorrevano gli stati dell’Europa meridionale. Fra le tragedie esaminate nell’articolo vi sono opere di autori noti come Lord Byron, nonché di figure di drammaturghi di successo ma ingiustamente dimenticati quali James Sheridan Knowles, John Howard Payne, Felicia Hemans e Mary Russell Mitford. Nel considerare il nesso tra drammaturgia, messinscena e ideologia, l’articolo intende fornire un contributo originale e di respiro internazionale a un campo di ricerca che si sta dimostrando uno dei più vivaci in seno ai ‘Romantic studies’ in Gran Bretagna e negli Stati Uniti