Ann Radcliffe’s poetry: The poetics of refrain and inventory

Abstract

It has always been possible to read Radcliffe’s poems apart from her novels: in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Radcliffe advertises the fact that ‘The Traveller’ and ‘The Pilgrim’ had appeared earlier in a periodical publication, and several reviewers, including Anna Laetitia Barbauld in The British Novelists (1810), advocated the independent perusal of her verses. In The Italian (1796–7), Radcliffe stopped mixing original poetry with her narrative, presumably in response to critics who found the interspersed lyrics distracting. Her final novel, Gaston de Blondeville (1826), incorporates verse again, but in a more restrained manner: rather than providing alternative access to the heroine’s subjectivity, the lyrics in Gaston are produced by a gleeman or minstrel. A section of ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ is appended in volume iv after St Alban’s Abbey (1826), and the final poem, ‘Scene on the Northern Shore of Sicily’, seems designed to comment on Radcliffe’s œuvre as a whole: Positioning the poet outside the cottage, between the realms of the domestic and the edgeless ocean in a stream of restless movement, this territory defines Radcliffe’s habitual location. The suggestion of a recurrent motion in ‘once more’ and more ambiguously in ‘still’ is significant, as is the attraction to forms that ‘delude’ – in the sense of beguiling or playing with – the authority of capitalised ‘Truth’. This chapter will go against recent critical tendencies by analysing Radcliffe’s poetry for its poetic technique and not just in dialogue with the novel in which it was usually (but not always) embedded. I shall examine a selection of poems that appeared in the unauthorised 1816 collection, The Poems of Mrs Ann Radcliffe, from the perspective of canonical Romantic poetry, focusing on Radcliffe’s formal craftsmanship and her engagement with contemporary aesthetic and cultural debates.