“I Fear the Spirits of Its Celebrated Bards, Are Entirely Fled”: Felicia Hemans’s Wales Revisited

Abstract

ABSTRACTFelicia Hemans has come to be understood as a national voice of early-nineteenth-century Wales, where she lived and wrote during some of her most formative years. Discussions of this role, which have produced a range of opinions, have focused on her 1822 publications Welsh Melodies and “The Meeting of the Bards, Written for an Eisteddfod, or Meeting of the Welsh Bards, Held in London, May 22d, 1822,” with an infrequent gesture also to her 1827 “Farewell to Wales.” However, in narrowing their focus to these texts, scholars have overlooked the fact that Wales was a major presence in Hemans’s poetry across her entire career. Consequently, their conclusions on Hemans’s Wales have been incomplete. This essay examines Wales across Hemans’s entire poetic output equally, determining that: Hemans employed Wales in a very consistent manner across her oeuvre (including her biographical and historical work); for her, Wales operated as a site of English imperial expansion similarly to how other sites did in her more well-known poems (such as “England’s Dead”); and, participating in prevailing contemporary English dialogues concerning “Welsh identity,” her work promoted Welsh assimilation into English culture and society.