Barrett Browning's Poetic Vocation: Crying, Singing, Breathing

Abstract

The poetic career of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from apprentice to master has been mapped many times. Her turn from cloistered classicism and imitation in her early poems to self-assertion and innovation in Aurora Leigh has been carefully described, for example, by Dorothy Mermin. Mermin convincingly shows that Barrett Browning's "main subject" and "struggle," throughout her career, is "to find woman's place in the central tradition of poetry." 1 In her 1995 book on Barrett Browning, Marjorie Stone traces the development of the poetry up to Aurora Leigh by placing it in the context of Victorian ideas about genre, and also studying it in terms of her contemporary critical reception. 2 Recently, Linda M. Lewis has more rigorously emphasized Christian contexts, while once again working towards Aurora Leigh, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress (1998). 3 Most critics, to one degree or another, use Aurora Leigh as both a model and a goal for organizing their overview of Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh, for all its heterogeneity and failings, is still the most original of her works, and also the most like autobiography, as the most expressive. Barrett Browning's brilliant voice-until now partly hidden in her letters-bursts out, singularly, powerfully, even as her heroine recites a story of finding herself as a poet, of finding her poetic voice.