ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
overlooking two of the more celebrated women of the era, whose activities in
print were regarded by contemporaries as not merely unusual or exceptional but
singular. I mean, of course, the woman who sometimes regally referred to herself
as “Margaret the First,” or, alternatively, was referred to by others as “Mad Madge”—
Margaret Lucas Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, whose behavior and dress
shocked contemporaries of both sexes, and whose vast literary output Virginia
Woolf once likened to “some giant cucumber [spreading] itself over all the roses
and carnations in the garden,” 35 but which also has entitled her to an increasingly
appreciated place in history “as the first Englishwoman to write a substantial body
of literature intentionally for publication.” 36 And I mean, too, Cavendish’s infinitely
more respectable contemporary, “The Matchless Orinda,” Katherine Philips,
England’s first publicly celebrated female poet. With each we leave behind the
Biblically-based utterances of mid-century and enter the world of Restoration
verse and visibility.
Their routes to “fame”—a favorite word of Cavendish’s—could hardly be less
alike, yet their separate pathways are deeply familiar ones in the seventeenth
century. Philips, on the one hand, claimed the social and artistic privileges that
traditionally belonged to an elite manuscript culture. Only after a “pirated” edition
of her Poems was published in 1664 did the “Incomparable/Mrs. K.P.” emerge into
full view in a “corrected” version of 1667, and then only in the company of
commendatory poems written by six different hands and prefaced by a posthumous
epistle supplied by the modest Philips herself denying that her verse had ever
been intended for an audience beyond a private few. With her sudden early death
from smallpox in 1664, what was once “incomparable” had become “matchless.”
These double adjectives now decorated the title page of the folio editions of her
Poems in 1667, 1669, and 1678, where, in addition to the new verse translations
Philips had made of Corneille’s Pompey and Horace, each of these handsome
editions also included a carefully wrought engraved frontispiece of a bust of
“Orinda” in a niche done by William Faithorne, the Elder, England’s great engraver
(Fig. 3). 37 As Edward Phillips said of Katherine Philips in his Theatrum Poetarum,
hedging his bets only slightly, she was “the most applauded, at this time, Poetess of
our Nation, either of the present or former Ages.” 38
Cavendish, on the other hand, plunged into the world of print with Witherlike
gusto. Beginning with Poems and Fancies, her one book solely devoted to verse
and published in 1653, and continuing for more than a decade, she wrote in a
medley of genres: drama, philosophical prose, prose romance, biography,
autobiography, science fiction, and the familiar letter (or Sociable Letters, as she
called them); and on many topics, but especially those related to the New Sciences:
matter, motion, atomism. She also struck a number of radically different poses for
the Antwerp artist, Abraham van Diepenbeke, which were used, and sometimes
reused, as frontispieces for individual works. The “Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and
Excellent Princesse,” as she came to be known after the Restoration, appears as
imperious virago in The World’s Olio (1655), The Blazing World (1668), and the
Plays (1668); as modest domestic partner in a circle of storytellers for Nature’s
239