Poetry

Abstract

For much of the two centuries following the Romantic era, its poetry was defined largely, if not exclusively, by the work of male poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, with William Blake added regularly after the mid 1950s. This "canon" was variously augmented by other male poets including Robert Burns, George Crabbe, Walter Scott, Leigh Hunt, Walter Savage Landor, and Samuel Rogers, and since the 1980s especially, John Clare. Conspicuously absent was Robert Bloomfield, whose The Farmer’s Boy (1800) enjoyed great circulation but whose laboring-class origins and lifestyle relegated him to the margins of a literary-historical account dominated by more patrician tastes. The greatest exclusions from the canon, though, involved women, whose names and poetry were largely absent from discussions of Romantic poetry for most of the twentieth century. Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), the most commercially successful Romantic-era woman poet on both sides of the Atlantic, became by the twentieth century a talisman for condescending notions of women as poets of hearth, home, heart, and shallow sentimentality: her celebrated contemporary, Letitia Elizabeth Landon ("L. E. L.") (1802-38), fared little better in a literary history of Romantic-era Britain that was written almost exclusively by, for, and about men - and particularly academic men, scholars and students alike. When it appeared at all in twentieth-century anthologies, women’s poetry was relegated to dismissive sub-categories such as minor poets or lyric poets that resolutely kept women poets outside of the canonical company, even while claiming to include them. Exclusions of this sort went virtually unchallenged in a society (on both sides of the Atlantic) in which women did not in fact enjoy anything like equal status. Their exclusion was perpetuated through the trickle-down enculturation produced by male-dominated academic institutions where (typically male) scholars and teachers set the (also typically male) curriculum that was passed down as literary canon law to generations of aspiring teachers (many of them, ironically, female) who in turn passed it along to the students of both sexes with whose education they were charged.