The Couplet and the Poem: Late Seventeenth-Century Women Reading Katherine Philips

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines how two late seventeenth-century women read Katherine Philips as attested by their surviving manuscript compilations. In her commonplace book, Katherine Butler quotes from six poems by Philips, her passages ranging in length from a couplet to an entire poem. Her favoured theme is friendship, but she is also drawn to passages that treat the emptiness of worldly pleasures and the need to master passions. Stylistically, Butler favours the rhyming couplet in the commonplace book as a whole, but when she quotes Philips she is drawn to both rhyming couplets and other stanzaic forms. Sarah Cowper includes two passages from Philips in two different manuscripts: an alphabetical, thematically arranged commonplace book and a largely prose religious miscellany. In the former, Cowper includes a couplet on implicit religious duties being the most acceptable and, in the latter, she includes the entire poem “A prayer”, which we know from a diary entry of 1701 that she admired. For both readers, Philips was a source of pithy, extractable wisdom, but also a skilled literary stylist. Philips's posthumous reputation may have been primarily based on her modest and decorous persona, but here are two readers who also appreciated her as a poet.