Romantic poetry, sexuality, gender Between 1780 and 1830, at least 2,584 volumes of poetry were published by women, with approximately 900 women poets publishing during roughly this same period.9 The proliferation of women’s poetry troubled to some extent all the canonical poets – from Wordsworth’s complaint in the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads over the “deluges of idle and extravagant verse,” to Keats’s anxious distancing of his work from Mary Tighe’s Psyche, to Byron’s satirical attacks on Bluestockings as intellectual upstarts in The Blues (1821) In some respects, Keats and Byron persisted in a losing battle for the remasculinization of poetry in the 1820s; as Richard Cronin observes, “it may be significant that the years in which women poets were dominant coincided fairly precisely with the years in which the sale of poetry collapsed.”10 The overall number of individual volumes of poetry did decline after 1820, and some publishers refused to publish poetry a decade later (famously, John Murray, who had already made his fortune publishing Byron) Yet one could make a counterargument against this familiar decline of poetry model, using the publishing successes of women poets, whose number of volumes published seems relatively stable through the mid-1830s.11 The “decline of poetry” thesis works in part by eclipsing the popularity of women poets, reviving a false (though Romantic) dilemma: “a choice between a vulgar popularity and an insubstantial isolation.”12 Hemans and Landon supported extended families through their poetry, which has recently begun to attract the serious intellectual debate that it deserves Hemans’s poetry in particular sold in the tens of thousands throughout the nineteenth century, making her one of the bestselling British poets.13 To relegate these important Romantic poets to “vulgar popularity” is to replicate uncritically the anxieties of their male contemporaries Moreover, if we consider the proliferation of poetry in the annuals and gift books, which sold in the tens of thousands in the 1820s and 1830s, and did so by targeting women readers, one could argue that poetry’s readerships increased at the end of the Romantic period, though the cultural capital of poetry did not The rise of feminized new poetic media like annuals, though they may have priced much (hitherto male) poets’ individual volumes out of the market, also produced new poetic identities like that of “poetess.” This feminized model of a poet enjoyed a continuum of gendered associations – from a low point as emasculated, diminutive emanation of true poet, to its moralized apotheosis in the minds of literary critics like Alexander Dyce and Frederic Rowton, who imagined the poetess as the essentially feminine and sentimental poet of the domestic affections so popular with early Victorian readers Poets like Hemans, Landon, and Mary Robinson assumed the role of “poetess” at various stages in their careers, but it is a mistake to identify any of them consistently as a self-declared “poetess.” At the end of her career, Robinson 161 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008