The cambridge companion to british roman 185

Romantic poetry, sexuality, gender art and artistry” from writers like Hemans (in “Prosperzia Rossi”), Letitia Landon (in The Improvisatrice), John Keats (in Lamia), and Mary Robinson in her 1796 volume, Sappho and Phaon Sappho inaugurated this tradition, which nineteenth-century poets like Hemans and Tennyson continued, under the problematic sign of “poetess.” Indebted to the aestheticized sentimentality of Hemans, the hypnotic metrics of Robinson,18 and the autoerotic solitaries of Landon, Tennyson the poetess illustrates the queer shifts in the gendering of nineteenth-century poetic identities The poetess figure, whether male or female, remains fertile ground for selfreflexive meditations on the gendering of poetry and poetic identities By the time Tennyson published his poetess poems in 1830 and 1832, the poetess phenomenon was beginning its decline, the subject of satirical attacks like the Countess Blessington’s “The Stock in Trade of Modern Poetesses.” Like Landon’s many self-reflexive comments on the construct of “poetess” (too often read by modern critics as Landon’s unmediated experience as a “poetess”), Blessington’s poem was published in an expensive annual (The Keepsake for 1833) largely responsible for proliferating the poetess phenomenon Blessington satirizes the mass-produced metaphors of poetess poetry that connected this phenomenon to both senses of clich´e – new typeface technology, and the derivative verse that this technology proliferated: Stars and planets shining high, Make one feel ’twere bliss to die; Twilight’s soft mysterious light; Suns whose rays are “all” too bright; Wither’d hopes, and faded flowers, Beauties pining in their bowers; Broken harps, and untuned lyres; Lutes neglected, unquench’d fires; Vultures pecking at the heart, Leaving owners scarce a part.19 Blessington’s poem makes “poetess” available to both male and female poets: “’twere bliss to die” is a Hemans constant but also echoes Pope’s patriotic translation of The Iliad, and even Keats’s “Nightingale”; similarly, “beauties pining in their bowers” resonates equally well with Landon as with Tennyson The neglected lutes littering the landscapes of Hemans and Landon, meanwhile, coexist with the Promethean torments of Byron The point is not that poetess poetry is derivative of male-authored poetry, but that trademarks that we now associate with male poets were in 1833 the “stock in trade of modern poetesses.” The heroes in these poetess poems are Byronic – “Half a brigand – half corsair” – or perhaps, inversely, Byronic heroes are 163 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008