ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
century about Milton being Spenser’s “poetical son” reminds us that the
language of literary inheritance at this time is still the language of the dominant
(male) culture. 9 As Bathsua Makin observes, examples of female poets could be
traced as far back as Corinna of Thebes in the third century BC and Sappho in
the sixth century BC (with a few references to Minerva thrown in for good
measure), but the discontinuous nature of her comments makes another point
as well. At this moment in history, there was no “tradition” of women’s poetry
that might parallel the version so comfortably enunciated by Dryden: no talk of
female authors conversing with one another, no talk of one soul becoming
“transfused” into the body of another. 10 In Makin’s formulation, Bradstreet and
Philips exist next to each other as contemporaries but not in “relation” to each
other. Bradstreet comes first, with her own “Works” testifying independently to
her qualities as a poet, then Philips. For Philips, however, “we need no other
Encomium…than what Mr. Cowley gives”; her connection is not with Bradstreet
but with the dominant tradition, although Makin also goes on to add in the
manner of an afterthought, “besides, her Works in print speak for her.”
Mary Wroth (1587?–1651?) and Aemilia Lanyer
(1569–1645)
The problem of access to literary traditions and models was, of course, less severe
for women with connections to literary families, and to some degree the
difference between the two most interesting (and ambitious) female Jacobean
poets—Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer—can be accounted for in these terms:
Wroth near the center, Lanyer on the periphery of elite society. Notwithstanding
the spectacular collapse of her personal fortunes after the death of her husband,
Sir Robert Wroth, in 1614 and a personal life that soon exceeded the
conventional in the two illegitimate children she bore her rakish cousin William
Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke, Mary Wroth seems always to have written
as a Sidney. She found thoroughly congenial the courtly, amatory genres favored
by her famous uncle (and in slighter fashion by her father, Sir Robert Sidney),
and as a woman, she exhibited the determination to write as shown earlier by
her celebrated aunt and namesake, Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke. 11
To be a Sidney in Jacobean England was already to belong to a literary tradition,
as Jonson so clearly understood in writing “To Penshurst.” Penshurst Place was
also the home of Mary Sidney before she became Mary Wroth.
More specifically, being a Sidney meant writing sonnets and pastoral lyrics, a
play for a private audience—in this case the Neoplatonic Love’s Victory—and
many, many pages of prose, interspersed with lyrics in imitation of The Countess
of Pembroke’s Arcadia. The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, published in a first
installment in 1621 of some 350,000 words (a second installment of another
240,000 words is still in manuscript), is the work of a Jacobean (female) Sidney,
buoyed up by an allegiance to both aunt and uncle. It is a beautiful folio volume,
replete with a handsome title page spelling out the author’s distinguished family
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