Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century by Claudia Thomas Kairoff

Abstract

Book Reviews Claudia Thomas Kairoff. Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii+308. $55. In an 1807 letter to Walter Scott, Anna Seward (1742-1809) disparaged Wordsworth as an “egotistic manufacturer of metaphysical importance upon trivial themes” (194). This Keatsian tidbit in Claudia Kairoff’s Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century underscores not only Seward’s at times acerbic wit but also her “defense ofprinciples threatened by emer­ gent Romantic values” (162). Such Augustan “principles” are everywhere on display in this comprehensive exploration of Seward’s verse. From her repeated use ofpersonification to her emphasis on decorum and propriety, Seward appears as “one of the last neoclassicists,” as Paula Backscheider puts it (162), or in Kairoff’s words, “essentially an eighteenth-century poet” (ix). As the monograph’s title also telegraphs, Kairoffclaims that Seward’s po­ etry stands as an inflection point, “the missing link between Augustan and Romantic writing, combining a sophisticated knowledge of prosody with her ability to dramatize sensibility” (17). Kairoff repeatedly finds Seward “anticipating” (3, 6, 7, 8, etc.) the canonic figures with whom she was con­ temporary in her later years: most often Wordsworth, but also Blake and Jane Austen. The Romanticism sketched by Kairoff is less than nuanced, with all the accent on feeling and solipsism, as though “sophisticated pros­ ody” were abandoned after the French Revolution. No one would deny that verse primitivism became vital with the Romantics, most famously through the ballad revival, but Byron, Shelley, and Keats are certainly as “sophisticated” prosodists as any of the 18th century. The second-generation Romantics are not really Kairoff’s concern so much as a subdisciplinary periodization that has “marginalized” (3) the poet she is championing. She aims to counteract “nearly two hundred years of critical neglect” (1) by showing how Seward’s work “elucidates the eighteenth-century roots of many Romantic-era trends” (3). And yet, at the same time, Kairoff assails the application of Romantic standards to Seward. Instead of treating Seward as “a victim” (26) as in her first chapter on the poet’s fall from critical grace, “Under Suspicious Circumstances,” Kairoff might have benefited from considering how other neoclassical po­ ets of the Romantic period (Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell, among SiR, 52 (Fall 2013) 459 460 BOOK REVIEWS others) have likewise been critically disappeared, and from considering in broader terms the era’s controversies over neoclassical poetics. Kairoff aims to rehabilitate Seward as “an important poet” (31) by dis­ crediting the apparently widespread belief that she wrote “indifferent verse,” in Germaine Greer’s words (26). Value is located in Seward’s “beautifully crafted lines” and “technical agility” (136). In Kairoff, Seward has found a most generous reader, who never fails to identify how the po­ ems “rewardf ] attentive reading” (44). This formal analysis forces us to concede that Seward did indeed “labor[ ] to create mellifluous sound pat­ terns in her verse” (230). But Kairoff’s stress on technique also makes patent Seward’s disavowal of “metaphysical importance.” From our Ro­ manticist perspective, we cannot help but notice the neoclassical tendency to subordinate complex issues to grand gestures and often-inconsequential “mellifluous” effect. We may be more sympathetic to Walter Scott and his Wordsworthian critiques ofthe poet than to Kairoff’s outrage at his “insid­ ious tone” (19) and “condescending attitude” (23). If we overlook this polemic on “neglected” genius, however, Kairoff’s study helpfully illuminates the social circumstances under which a “lady” might have composed poetry in Seward’s day. In chapters 2 and 3, we wit­ ness Seward’s first forays into verse at salons where poetic contests were held. Kairoff shows how poetry production featured in the life of the gen­ tility and how the “amateur” poet could practice for later “professional” excursions. At the same time, Kairoff reminds us that the locus romanticus of the solitary stroller was not one Seward could easily inhabit: “the typical lady, hardly ever expected to venture forth without a servant or compan­ ion, had no hope of approaching, let alone fulfilling, that ideal” (52). Such limitations did not force Seward into the role of “a retiring domes­ tic...