“Materials for Imagination”: Shelleyan Traces in Felicia Hemans's Poetry After 1822

Abstract

This essay takes its title from a phrase used by Maria Jewsbury in a review article of 1831, which discusses Hemans's mid-career change towards a more expressive and imaginative poetry. The essay illustrates how traces of Shelley's writings pervade the poetry of the 1820s and afterwards, and, without slighting the intertextual relations that Hemans's work has with the poetry of Byron and Wordsworth, it argues for a fuller sense of the uses to which Hemans puts Shelley's poetry. It contends that Hemans has a productive awareness of Shelley's capacity for self-conflict, and that she is able to infuse Shelleyan notes into her work in ways that help us account for her poetry's rich mingling of moods and effects.