Women Poets and the Sister Arts in Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract

Classical antiquity gave us the notion of the arts as sisters, and Renaissance Italy the drama of their sibling rivalry. 1 In the "republic of taste" of eighteenth-century Britain, poetry, painting, and sculpture were companionable sisters, so long as the family of genres reflected the social order: pastoral verse and flower painting were classified as feminine pastimes suitable for lady amateurs; and epic poetry and history painting as masculine genres for gentlemen with a classical education or professional training. 2 While sculpture provided ideal forms for both painting and poetry, its practice was also considered the most masculine of occupations, requiring the skills of a workman and the study of human anatomy. Like their Romantic predecessors, Victorian women poets capitalized on the signs of cultivation and distinction reflected in the poetics of ut pictura poesis ("as a painting, so a poem") and used it to distinguish feminine amateurism from masculine artistry. This essay will suggest that it is worth exploring how the rise of professional women painters and sculptors in the nineteenth century informed various forms of sister arts verse by poets actively engaged with the concept of a rivalry among the arts. Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and a host of other male poets responded in kind. But in their embodiment of the sister arts metaphor, I want to explore some of the complexities of sisterhood and rivalry expressed by several female poets and one art critic.