Admired and understood: the poetry of Aphra Behn

Abstract

Admired and Understood analyzes Behn's only pure verse collection, Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), and situates her in her literary milieu as a poet. Behn's book demonstrates her desire for acceptance in her literary culture, to be admired and understood, as she puts its, the antitheses of what many surmise from reading her other works - that she saw herself primarily as a guerilla critic of her culture's views on race, class, and gender. The introduction to Admired and Understood argues that her colleagues thought of her as poet first, rather than as a dramatist, reviews current criticism about Behn, and provides a brief overview of late seventeenth-century poetical theory. The first chapter explains the intricately interwoven structure of Behn's collection. The next two chapters concern intertextual linkages between Behn and Abraham Cowley, as well as the influence of Thomas Creech's translations of Horace, Theocritus, and Lucretius on her poetics. The ensuing chapters concern Behn's response to Rochester's libertine aesthetic, a close reading of On a Juniper-Tree (a poem central to her collection), Katherine Philips as Behn's most important predecessor as a woman writing poetry, and her epistolary verse novel, A Voyage to the Isle of Love, the cornerstone and climax of her collection. M. L. Stapleton is Professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University.