“I’ll Repress the Rising Anguish/Till Thine Eyes Behold the Light”: Passionate Responsibility in Maternal Poetry

Abstract

Exploring eighteenth-century poetry about unborn children, Buckley examines the cultural restraints placed upon expectant mothers to voice only positive emotions about their pregnancies and the subversive techniques employed by women writers to express their frustrations. While man-midwives such as Thomas Denman propagated the notion that most forms of maternal imagination were nonsense, they also insisted that the passions of a pregnant woman were intimately connected to the foetus. Elizabeth Boyd, Jane Cave, Isabella Kelly, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth’s use of maternal passion in their poetry therefore probes the tensions of late eighteenth-century maternity. Buckley suggests that maternal imagination not only survived in poetry, but evolved, perhaps because its central aspects – maternity, emotion and imagination – were also crucial to the Romantic aesthetic.