ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
wrote but wrote poetry and wrote in increasing numbers as the century
progressed, we should be wary of constructing a version of female poetic
authority that mirrors too closely the beliefs and assumptions available only to
the dominant male writers of the period. And we should be cautious, too, of
implying a counter-myth of poetic originality and technical experimentation to
match what was happening in the mainstream, as varied and multiple in its
tributaries as it was. For religious, social, and economic reasons, the range of
activities available was far more limited for women than for men. Narrower still
was a corresponding range of experience that might find expression in poetry. In
a culture that rarely tired of praising women for their chastity of mind, tongue,
and body—and censuring them when any of the three were thought to be
absent—a good many of the “new” genres practiced at the turn of the century
were simply out of bounds as acceptable subjects for imitation. Satire and the
epigram, for instance, were decidedly and, from the point of view of female
authorship, inhospitably “masculine” in stance and attitude, as was the Ovidian
elegy, with its frank eroticism and frequent celebration (or denigration) of the
female body. Lady Bedford might be seen as an appropriate reader for Donne’s
satires, as Jonson points out in one epigram, but when he praises her in another
poem for her “learned and manly soul,” it is not because he thought she should
put on the habit of the satirist. As Rosalind, playing the man and voicing the
dominant view, says in As You Like It, “Woman’s gentle brain/Could not drop
forth such giant-rude invention” (IV, iii, 34–5).
At the same time, the kind of literary ambition revealed by a Drayton or a
Jonson depended in large part on strategic and frequent ventures into the public
arena of print. But for women, speaking through the medium of print was
potentially a doubly fraught affair. Along with the usual class strictures operating
in aristocratic circles, where the opportunities for literacy by women were
greatest, went the accompanying perception that the public sphere was hardly
the place for any woman to air her views. In her one act of publication, for
instance, Mary Wroth found herself the target of a furious attack by Edward
Denny, Baron of Waltham, for supposedly slandering him in the first part of her
prose romance Urania, published in 1621; and Denny’s method of attack, which
Wroth turned against him, was to underscore her sexually “unnatural”
appearance in print as “Hermaphrodite in show.” 5 (Without admitting to his
allegations, Wroth nonetheless stopped the sale of her book.) As the epigraph
taken from King’s poem again suggests, the perceived secondary status of women
contributed to the wider cultural assumption that women exist as poets by
permission, not by right (“wee scarce allow your Sex to prove/Writers”), and that
the “self” King imagines being “planted” and multiplying (“peopled”) does so
within a restricted and private space (“this Little Book”), not as part of the
public sphere. It is little wonder that scarcely a printed volume of poetry written
by a woman appears in the earlier seventeenth century that does not find a way
to apologize for its public appearance (and even, as happens with a Lanyer or
Cavendish, to make that apology into the extended subject of the poetic
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