The Columbia History of British Poetry (93 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 372
and great power, he is a "destroyer and preserver" in a sense far more darkly imagined than Percy Shelley's West Wind. According to Barbauld, "arts, arms, and wealth destroy the fruits they bring."
Barbauld's is a root-and-branch critique of a systemic malaise. The most disturbing thought of all is that a demonic force can be traced as easily in the "Arts" as in any other feature of civilization. The (Romantic) imagination that art is not among the ideologies is dismissed in Barbauld's textas it was not in Byron's famous poem of the same year, and as it typically would not be in most Romantic texts.
Whereas Byron's despair held out a secret Romantic (i.e., personal) hope, Barbauld's final hopethe poem ends with a vision of freedom for Americacan only suggest an unnerving question: If spring comes, can winter be far behind?
Comparable to
Childe Harold
.
A Romaunt
in so many ways, Barbauld's poem differs from Byron's in one crucial respectit genders the issues. The "capricious" Promethean Genius is gendered male; the knowledge of suffering, female. To note this is not to suggest the poem is arguing a moral equation of men with evil and women with good. It
is
to suggest, however, that a new way of seeing may emerge when an alienated imagination comes to consciousness. The fact that Barbauld's poemunlike Byron'swas denounced and then forgotten as soon as it appeared is telling, particularly given the respect and fame that Barbauld's work enjoyed. Barbauld's poem seemed grotesque and anomalous from a writer who had come to define the proprieties of the feminine imagination for almost fifty years.
"an alienated imagination": Romanticism feeds off various experiences of alienation and is preoccupied with marginal writers and localized sensibilities. The idea is that alienation (as well as various congruent forms of experience, like historical backwardness) give privileged insight precisely by standing apart from normal experience. In this context, women's writing of the period possesses a singular importance.
In this respect her poem would prove a song before the dark sunrise of the poetry of the 1820s and 30s. Literary history has all but forgotten this interregnum because its work is marked with the sign of a bourgeois Cain. With the emergence of Gift Books and literary Annuals as the dominant outlets for poetry, the arts appeared to have indeed destroyed their own best fruits and scattered the high altars of the imagination. It is a fast world dominated by a self-conscious trade in art and a studious pursuit of cultural fashion in every sense.
 
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In face of it twentieth-century readers have learned to avert their eyes and await the coming of the reliable seriousness of Tennyson and Browning.
Two womenthey both wrote for money, to support themselves and their familiespreside over the poetry scene that developed with the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron. One was Felicia Hemans, who would prove the most published English poet of the nineteenth century. The other was Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, the famous L. E. L., whose death in 1838 turned her life and career into one of the foundational cultural myths of the period.
In certain respects the two writers could not be more different: Hemans's work focuses on domestic issues and a Wordsworthian ideology of "the country," whereas Landon, distinctly an urban writer, explores the treacherous crosscurrents of love. Because each moves within a clearly defined female imagination of the world, however, their work independently establishes new possibilities for poetry.
XX. But what's so special about these two women? Literary historians have had no trouble characterizing the immediate aftermath of high Romanticism in relation to writers like Beddoes, Darley, Hood, and Clare.
AA. All interesting and important writers. But have they been read to deepen our understanding of Romanticism? Not even Clare has made much of a difference in this respect, although his work might easily have served. Neither his class position nor his madness has been taken seriously enough by critics or literary historians. Hemans and Landon are important because their feminized imaginations establish clear new differentials. Their work gives us a surer grasp of what was happening in those forgotten decades of the 1820s and 30s.
Take Hemans for instance. The draining melancholy of her poetry carries special force exactly because of its domesticity. What is most unstable, most threatened, is what she most valuesthe child and its immediate world, the family unit (centered in the mother). Hemans's central myth represents a home where the father is (for various reasons) absent. This loss turns the home to a precarious scene dominated by the mother. As in Wordsworth, one of Hemans's most important precursors, the mother's protective and conserving imagination presides over a scene of loss (see "The Homes of England," for instance, or "The Graves of a Household"). But whereas
 
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Wordsworth's (male) myth of (feminine) nature licenses what he called a "strength in what remains behind," Hemans's is an imagination of disaster because (unlike Wordsworth's nature) Hemans's mothers are so conscious of their fragile quotidian state.
The disaster is clearly displayed in poems like "The Image in Lava" and "Casabianca." Theatrical by modernist conventions, these lyrics deploy Byronic extravagance as a vehicle for measuring social catastrophe and domestic loss. "The Image in Lava" studies the epic destruction of Pompeii in a bizarre silhouette of a mother cradling her child. The artist of the end of the world is here imagined not on a grand scaleas a Blakean ''history painter"but rather as a miniaturist. For Hemans, catastrophe is finally what Byron famously called "home desolation," and world-historical events are important only because they help to recall that fact.
Babe! wert thou brightly slumbering
Upon thy mother's breast,
When suddenly the fiery tomb
Shut round each gentle guest?
Hemans's poem is imagining a new burning babe and a new sacred heart. The events at Pompeii comprise a mere figure for the "impassioned grasp" that bonds child to mother. Burning in the fire of their relationshipsetting their fires against "the cities of reknown / Wherein the mighty trust"mother and child transcend the Pompeiian world. As Blake might have said, they "go to Eternal Death" (
Jerusalem
), which now reveals itself in and as the poem Hemans is writing, what she calls a "print upon the dust."
In "Casabianca," another poem of fiery immolation, Hemans emphasizes the psycho-political basis of destruction in "the cities of reknown." Explicitly set in a modern context (the Battle of the Nile, August 1798), the poem anatomizes the ideology of glory in the death of the thirteen-year-old "son of the admiral of the Orient," Commodore Casabianca. Standing to his duty in a secular fiery furnace, the boy is the central figure of a complex iconograph of the violence society exacts of itself as payment for its pursuit of power and glory. The sentimentalism of the scene is a feminizing textual move. The boy pleads for a word from his "unconscious" father that would release him from "the burning deck," but the language of the father is defined as a fearful symmetry of heroic silence and awful noise.
 
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The upshot is a poem of violent death brooded over by a beautiful but ineffectual angel of (maternal) love.
It is crucial to understand that Hemans's feminine imagination does not solve the problems it exposes. Her sentimentalism is revelatory. Readers cannot forget that "Casabianca" recollects one of Nelson's mythic victories over the French, and a turning point in the Napoleonic wars. But Hemans's poem deliberately forgets to remember that saint of English imperialism. Nelson and England's sea power supply the poem with its obscure and problematic scene.
Standing with the young Casabianca on the burning French flagship, Hemans puts the war and its champions in a better perspective: in worlds where power measures value, imaginative truth seeks to find itself in powerlessness. The young Casabianca's moral and emotional position, what the poem calls his "still, yet brave despair," defines the complete equivocalness of what he represents. That he stands as the
figura
of "Casabianca"of Hemans's own poetry in generalis finally a central argument of the work.
Landon's writing devotes itself to similar pursuits, as a text like "Lines of Life" or her many poems for pictures show. "The Enchanted Island," for instance (after Francis Danby's painting of the same title), implodes upon its own "dream of surpassing beauty." Itself enchanted by that equivocal (and double-meaning) fantasy, Landon's poem initiates a severely antithetical reading of certain proverbial Romantic ideas, like "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'' and "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty." The truth that Landon repeatedly discovers in beautyincluding the beauty of artis death.
Keats of course had begun to make similar discoveries, but Landon's more intimate (female) knowledge of the institutions and machineries of beauty gave a special privilege to her work. Whereas Keats (like Byron) imagined a transcendent power coming from sorrow's knowledge, Landon's knowledge is like Eve's original (cursed) discovery of the cruel fantasy grounding the ideal of transcendent power.
Landon's imaginative authority rests in what she is able to fashion from her experience of passivity. The dynamic of love and courtshipLandon's great subjectsupplies the (female) object of the enchanted (male) gaze with a special self-consciousness. The women in Landon's poems are shrewd observers of their spectacular

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