a d r i a n a c r ac i u n so widely diffused throughout 1830s popular culture that they can no longer be designated by their author’s proper name, but are now reabsorbed within a feminized popular culture in which Byron discovered them in the first place (i.e., the Gothic) Blessington’s radical implication (compared to modern readings of the poetess) is that the poetess, not the Byronic poet, is the modern poet: “This now is all the stock in trade, / With which a modern poem’s made,” she concludes (p 153, emphasis added) The feminization of poetry is so complete by 1833 that all “modern” poets, whether they published earlier like Byron or recently like Tennyson, appear to write in its shadow Gender and specularization Hemans is widely credited as the central figure in this feminization of nineteenth-century British poetry In Records of Woman (1828), Hemans had extended woman’s domain internationally and transhistorically, elevating the domestic affections above all else as the ideal subject of poetry, and hence privileging women’s roles as both poets and poetic subjects In “The Grave of a Poetess,” the final poem in Records of Woman, Hemans offers a complex meditation on the poetess phenomenon, one addressed to an important (and unnamed) predecessor, the Irish poet Mary Tighe, who had been, like Hemans, both unhappily married and highly gifted Hemans’s reflection on this earlier “poetess” figure, one admired by Keats and Landon as well, famously concludes by severing the “poet’s eye” from “the woman’s heart,” implying that “poetess” embodies an awkwardly gendered hybrid: Where couldst thou fix on mortal ground Thy tender thoughts and high? Now peace the woman’s heart hath found, And joy the poet’s eye.20 This important meditation on the cultural codes gendering poetess and poet is typically read as Hemans’s critique of earthly regimes of gender that make poet and woman incompatible, or conversely, as Hemans’s compliance with these gendered codes that warn of disaster if women leave a female affective sphere to pursue a masculinized poetic vision As a meditation on the career of her predecessor Tighe, the closing of Hemans’s “The Grave of a Poetess” – the severance of eye and heart, vision and desire – knowingly revives Tighe’s central concern with the politics of vision, or specularization.21 In her six-canto Psyche (1805/11), Tighe rewrites the legend of Psyche and Eros to suggest that sexual knowledge is potentially empowering for women, and specifically for women poets Psyche’s 164 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008