Since 1970s and start of process of recovering Elizabeth Barrett Browning from servants' quarters of mansion of Literature where, in Virginia Woolf's famous description, poet bangs crockery around and eats vast handfuls of peas on point of a knife, (1) critics have reconsidered EBB and her works from a number of illuminating and persuasive critical positions. Indeed, we are now coming to recognize EBB as important for our understanding of areas as diverse as experiences of nineteenth-century woman writer, developments in Romantic and Victorian poetic aesthetics, and construction of nineteenth-century vates figure. How shall we re-read thee? Let me count ways. One area of inquiry which has been receiving increased critical attention of late is EBB's insightful, challenging, and sometimes controversial engagement with nineteenth-century European (2) Her later works--Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Aurora Leigh (1856), and Poems before Congress (1861)--have been a key focus of this inquiry, but as I have argued elsewhere (Avery and Stott, pp. 33-64), EBB was politically engaged from a very early age. Like her father and her eldest brother, she was a fervent supporter of Whigs, party of opposition whose political philosophy had at its heart a fundamental concern with legal, civil, and religious rights of individual--rights for which EBB herself would spend most of her life fighting. Certainly it is possible to read her earliest writings in this context. The Battle of Marathon (1820), for example, deals explicitly with emergence of notion of democracy and political egalitarianism, while An Essay on Mind (1826) and first poems which EBB published in The New Monthly Magazine and The Globe and Traveller show poet interrogating contemporary Greek war of independence against Turkey. (3) It is hardly surprising, then, that EBB's mother would accuse her daughter--in striking contrast to mythologized image of sickly poet--of suffering from the infection of politics. (4) In this essay, I want to explore how, in her writings of 1830s, EBB built upon her earlier political interests and to suggest how poetry published in her key volumes of that decade--Prometheus Bound, and Miscellaneous Poems (1833) and The Seraphim, and Other Poems (1838)--forms an important bridge between her politically inspired verse of 1820s and far more overt and combative engagement with contemporary politics in her poetry of 1840s and 1850s. This is not to suggest, however, that all of her writings can be slotted into some simple, developmental trajectory whereby she becomes increasingly explicit in her treatment of politics throughout her career. Indeed, it is specifically in 1830s that such an argument would break down. For here, rather than pushing overt political engagements of 1820s further, EBB appears to withdraw somewhat from direct commentary upon political issues in her poetry and turns instead to large mythic narratives, landscape poetry, and religious verse. And yet if we read 1830s poetry alongside EBB's diary, correspondence, and other documentation, it is possible, I argue here, to view it as reflecting, at least covertly, upon some of key political concerns of period and as examining those power structures and systems of control that EBB would continue to interrogate throughout her career. As I suggest, then, it is during 1830s that EBB, poet who would become renowned for her political outspokenness in subsequent decades, engages in that artistic and rhetorical practice which Emily Dickinson would later describe as [t]ell[ing] all truth but tell[ing] it slant. (5) By opening of 1830s, Barrett family was in many ways becoming increasingly insecure. The death of EBB's mother in 1828 had left family irrevocably shaken, and by 1830 it was becoming apparent that family fortunes were under threat as plantations in Jamaica from which Barrett family money derived began to lose profits rapidly following a drop in sugar prices. …
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Jan 10, 2008
Nikos D Lagaros + 1
Open Access