Verse Epistle

Abstract

The Romantic verse epistle might be characterized as a poetic form in hiding. Unlike the ode or the sonnet, it has received little critical attention as a form of interest to Romantic poets. Partly this reflects a sense that the writers of a new age turned away from the conventions of the previous century, where the verse epistle was a major form. Bill Overton (2006) estimates that 5 per cent of British eighteenth‐century poems were verse epistles. The form's most celebrated practitioner is Alexander Pope, and his most notable examples are ‘Epistles to Several Persons’ (or ‘Moral Essays’), ‘Satires of Horace’, and the ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’. His Ovidian heroic epistle ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (1717), in which Eloisa voices her struggles between memory of her passion for Abelard and her love of God, garnered great respect from Romantic writers and suggests continuities with the previous period. There is an added matter, that the verse epistle is subsumed in other genres such as satire or sentimentalism and therefore receives little direct recognition when it is in disguise. Romantic practice of the verse epistle should be viewed as balancing a backward look at tradition with a desire to communicate contemporary concerns about sociability, political perspectives, gender roles, and poetic self‐definition.