The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese

Abstract

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett-so began Robert Browning's first letter to the poet he was soon to meet, court, and marry. He went on to praise her poems' fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought.1 Such enthusiasm was not unusual then or later in the nineteenth century, for Elizabeth Barrett was a famous and respected writer whose work was considered learned, innovative, obscure, and difficult as well as expressive and moving. Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne admired her intensely when they were young and impressionable and much Pre-Raphaelite poetry shows her influence.2 Her poems offered a vital energy, a new and compelling music, a bold engagement with controversial social issues, and a combination of tough wit with passionate intensity that was more like Donne than anything yet published in the nineteenth century. Coventry Patmore found Sonnets from the Portuguese lofty, simple, and passionate-not at all the less passionate in being highly intellectual, and even metaphysical.3 Her use of the ballad tradition bore fruit in the work of Morris, Rossetti, and others, her poems on social themes were popular and influential, and Aurora Leigh, her feminist novel in verse, had a huge success (partly de scandale) and still charms readers with its wit, psychological acuteness, social comedy, and exuberant energy. But even with the current interest in female writers most of her poetry is neglected, while from Sonnets from the Portuguese-her most lastingly popular work and, next to Aurora Leigh, her most considerable poetic achievement-critics avert their eyes in embarrassment. The poem deserves much more attention from literary historians, however, both because of Barrett Browning's influence on later women poets and because it is the first of the semi-autobiographical, amatory, lyrical or partly lyrical sequences in modern settings that comprise one of the major innovations of Victorian literature.