Felicia Hemans's Public Poetry, Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity and the Imaginative Plenitude of the Victory Ode

Abstract

This essay explores strands of Felicia Hemans's poetry that are markedly certain in their conviction that the woman poet, when engaged with the wider world of Romantic classical scholarship and the elevated stance of the classical ode, can produce recuperative fantasies that offer alternatives to the fixed commemorative base of the elegy. Through a close reading of Hemans's triumphant first edition of The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816), her careful revisions to discourses of plenitude in the work of the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and her development of a woman's victory ode in “Properzia Rossi” (1828), the author suggests alternative readings of Hemans that are determined less by apocalyptic, self-consuming narratives of loss and more by a dynamic intertwining of human and divine potencies that shapes the Pindaric victory ode. Hemans approaches and reanimates the “records” she finds in history much in the same way that Winckelmann engages with both physical and imagined works of art from classical antiquity. In doing so, she asserts the ethically recuperative powers of the affectionate intellect.