ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

8
FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
Women poets of the earlier seventeenth century
When your faire hand receaves this Little Book,
You must not there for Prose or Verses look.
Those empty regions which within you see,
May by your self planted and peopled bee.
And though wee scarce allow your Sex to prove
Writers (unlesse the argument be Love)
Yet without crime or envy You have roome
Here both the Scribe and Authour to become.
Henry King, “Upon a Table-book presented to a Lady”
In almost all our chapters on seventeenth-century poetry, we could have dwelt
on the work of women poets. The Jacobeans Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer
have already been briefly mentioned in connection with Jonson. Nearer midcentury,
the little-known An Collins and the flamboyant Anna Trapnel
continue pietistic strains, one of a personal, meditative order associated with
Herbert and Vaughan, the other more radically political, with roots in prophetic
literature and the popular ballad. At the same time, the poetry of Anne
Bradstreet, the Puritan saint transplanted to the New World, was returning to
the English shores with echoes both familiar and strange, while Margaret
Cavendish was provocatively warbling her fanciful woodnotes wild. The next
decade witnessed the appearance of the royalist Katherine Philips, whose lyrics
responded creatively to the Caroline refinements already made on Donne and
Jonson and helped to inaugurate the notion of a modern tradition of female
poets.
Although questions remain about how best to represent and analyze the
achievements of women writers—doesn’t isolating them for reasons of gender
threaten to reproduce the conditions of secondariness many were contesting?—
there are practical advantages to thinking collectively about their poetry, much
of which is only becoming known outside specialized scholarly circles and yet
still eludes ready assessment. (The ongoing recovery and editing of primary texts
has made gaining an overview especially difficult.) 1 But there are theoretical and
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