Tradition and the Poetics of Self in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry

Tradition and how far writers fit into or diverge from the demands of tradition is one of the most debated issues in literary discussion. Gender, however, is not often part of discussions which depend on such questions at the decisiveness of the Modernist break with the Victorian period or whether Postmodernism makes tradition meaningless. By contrast the very existence of a specifically female tradition is still an urgent subject of debate, and it is clear that many nineteenth-century women writers were troubled in their search for literary foremothers. This autobiographical impetus can be located in the work of each of the poets discussed in Tradition and the Poetics of Self Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Bowles Southey, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. An exploration of the self, either in the abstract or in a more closely personal sense, appears in a concern with the craft of poetry and the role of the poet, in a teasing out of language as a marker of a personal encounter with the world, in an adventurous play with genre and a rewriting of myth, and in a bold confrontation with received notions of a woman’s place. Adventurousness marks the work of each of these poets and is a central focus of these essays.