Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (1737-1801), American poet & writer

Benjamin West (American 18th century painter): his family (there is a drawing of Elizabeth by West in the Historical Society of Pennysylvania)

Dear friends and readers,

On April 12th of this spring at a monthly meeting of the Washington Area Print Group I heard Rodney Mader tell the story of the life and writing of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, a learned woman from an upper class family in Pennsylvania. He gave a paper on her long melancholy autobiographical poem, The Deserted Wife, which prompted a lively 45 minute discussion afterward. This matter makes a fitting coda for the predominant themes of my blogs on the ASECS meeting at Cleveland this year: women’s life-writing, unconventional choices, and poetry.

Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson by Anne Ousterhout

Fergusson’s life course is intriguingly puzzling. She begins as a socialite, admired and well-read writer thoroughly ensconced in the local high cultural milieu. When young, she was engaged to Benjamin Franklin’s son; she wrote & circulated a Trip to Great Britain, an outgoing sophisticated travel book. She then marries Henry Hughes Fergusson, who became a loyalist during the American revolution. When Henry is thought to have impregnated a servant girl, Jenny, in her friend’s house, Elizabeth estranges herself from him. Although she refuses to listen to his pleas from England (where he eventually went) that he was guiltless of impregnating the girl and for her to return and live with him in the UK, she writes a poignant poem showing how intensely she feels the degradation of her position and loss of her husband. She remains angry with him for undermining the servant of her friend. Her grating and obsessive behavior eventually alienates all her friends (she is regarded as a pest) so she ends up a reclusive woman writing an unpublishable poem and late in life a translation of Fenelon’s Telemaque (a 17th century sequel to The Odyssey, all about Odysseus son’s education).

How did she change from publicly engaged woman to someone whose books were her friends. Prof Mader tended to account for Fergusson’s decision through her husband’s Scots loyalism. She was forced (unwillingly) to separate herself from this. The colony wanted to confiscate her property as that of the wife of a treacherous man. She was devoted to the place and it had been central to her identity. Nontheless, she fled her home at Graeme Park and lived with a friend, Betsy Stedman for the last 30 years of her life. But she did not find solace in this arrangement. Her poem tells her tale as an aching story of sexual betrayal and unhinging sorrow. Fergusson imitates Pope’s Eloisa and is like Richardson’s Clarissa; she alludes to Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, Edward Young, James Thomson, Henry Mackenzie, Lord Chesterfield. Prof Mader suggested the poem represents a moving gesture of containment and self-control.

Keith House, Graeme Park today

In the discussion afterward one scholar brought up the large Quaker community nearby. Was it a Quaker influence which led Fergusson to insist for real that sexual infidelity is not to be tolerated. Most women at the time would say they would not accept sexual infidelity but quietly tolerated it. Men were allowed to have mistresses. Quaker women’s culture provided for an empowerment of women: they would not tolerate the husband’s infidelities. Prof Mader said he believed that Jenny’s child was her husband’s; she had been a servant in the house of Charles Stedman, her friend Betsy’s uncle. Her Quaker friends would be against loyalism to the UK. Against that she seems trapped by social structures — did not want the kind of conformity whether unconventional or not Quakers demanded of their members. She wrote she did not like the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps (I suggested) she simply preferred not to marry, to live with and among women. People agreed that made sense. But there was her continual fight to re-gain her property which she spent so much on she ended up a bankrupt.

In talking about the poem, Prof Mader said Fergusson ventriloquizes (uses) other poets’ voices. The poem is very melancholy, a Penseroso. That it was not common for women to write private poetry. A couple of us disputed that. I pointed outAnne Finch who wrote of her private autobiographical experience through the masks of translation, fables, and public genres, to Charlotte Smith who simply openly wrote autobiographically (for which she was castigated by Anna Seward and often criticized by others). Another woman scholar talked of life-writing in later 17th century poetry of other women.

It’s a book history group and people also talked of the history of the manuscript, how people in the era kept commonplace books. The US had an oral culture. The interested reader can read the poem (published for the first time), together with Prof Mader’s introduction’ in “Rodney Mader, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s ‘The Deserted Wife’,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 135:2 (April 2011):151-90.

Engraved print of later 19th century impressionist painting by a woman, Tina Blau (1845 – 1916), Spring at the Prater

Ellen

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ASECS, Cleveland: Susannah Centlivre’s plays, Charlotte Smith’s poetry & romantic women’s gothics

Modern photo of Beachy Head, England

Dear friends and readers,

A fifth blog report on this year’s ASECS meeting in Cleveland. Centlivre. Three panels, two very early morning; one very late afternoon. Susannah Centlivre’s plays on gambling, addiction and marital and civil liberty speaks to us today so too the sources and power of Smith’s melancholy vast poetry. The gothic strange work of several later 18th century women writers is explained & defended.

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Folger production of The Basset Table: Valeria (Emily Trask) and Ensign Lovely (Robbie Gay) bond at Valeria’s lab table, where they share a discovery about worms.

An early morning session on Susannah Centlivre on Friday, 8:00 am (87, “A Woman’s Case”) surprised me by how good it was. Only recently have I had the opportunity to see one of Centlivre’s plays staged; it was so much better than than it had read, I realized I had not been giving them an adequate reading at all; these papers found Centlivre adumbrated humane understandings of addiction in the areas of gambling and alcoholism for men, and explored in a modern way the problem of personal or civil liberty.

Emma Ingrisani’s “‘If He Has Lost his Money, this News will break his Heart:’ Sentiment and Vice in Centlivre’s The Gamester claimed this play showed real sympathy for gamblers. Centlivre shows Valere’s gambling to be compulsive, but the qualities that led him to be addicted to gambling make him appealing. In gambling Valere experiences sublimity, he’s attached to gambling and feels himself magnificent; & the point is made that the man of feeling is not moral so much as someone who enjoys his emotions and is attuned to the emotions of others. The culture of sensibility alters the play’s criticism of gambling. The play is suggestive of an inner world in the characters, and seeks to explain supposedly abnormal impulses. The play’s conservative sexual politics parallels a sophisticated economic and social world. Angelia knows his faults, wants to marry Valere anyway as his dangerous masculine sexuality appeals.

In Aparna Gollapudi’s “The ‘Itch to Play:’ Gambling as Addiction in Centlivre’s The Gamester and The Basset Table are companion pieces. The male in The Gamester is an early prototype of an addict; the fame in The Basset Table cannot be an addict as such because as a woman she is unfree, bound to the will of others and thus does not have autonomy in the first place. Ms Gollapudi suggested the Enlightenment adumbrates the idea of an addict out of its concept of an ideal man of reason. Gambling is still considered a vice or sin, where we look at it psychologically (or chemically): the individual has lost control. In most plays we see gamblers play because they want to, not because they feel compelled to. The full idea of addiction (self-enslavement) comes in the later 19th century when people observed opium addiction. Ms Gollapudi cited much earlier treatises where drinking is shown to have an element of inner compulsion; Trotter: the drunkard is driven by cravings despite his intentions, irrationality, not for profit, unthinking pleasure, fueled by a failure of the will. Benjamin Rush gambling a disease or palsy of the will. Cotton’s Compleat Gamester is someone obsessed, with a deep-seated need, uncontrollable. Valere is exhausted in the morning; he earnestly vows to stop gambling, but he is at the table again soon after. Lady Sago is wasting her husband’s money, wilful and she and others are shocked into reform by showing them parallels with sexual complaisance. In the tradition of such plays, the male threatens financial harm to his family (e.g., Holcroft’s play); Lady Towneley chooses an irrational ideal of pleasure (Vanbrugh). Centlivre’s plays present a modern individual self in her depiction of gambling.

Lady Lucy (Katie deBuys), Sir James (Michael Milligan), Mrs. Sago (Tonya Beckman Ross), and Ensign Lovely (Robbie Gay)

Jennifer Airey’s “‘I must vary shapes as often as a player: Centlivre and liberty on the English stage” took up Centlivre’s defense of the stage against Collier’s criticism it’s immoral. In A Bold Stroke for a Wife, Colonel Feignwell frees Anne Lovely through his masquerading; the females help one another by using disguises too. Feignwell also defends his militarism as supporting the Hanoverian world which provides liberty for the subject; Anne Lovely shows us the right of women to resist male domestic tyrants who claim a power over individuals they do not deserve. Anne Lovely says her right to chose her dress (not to wear quaker clothes) is an aspect of her liberty, freedom of movement. She is justified, and enters a new contract with a better master; but her freedom goes only so far. The play’s parallel argument is that children are obliged to obey only when parents use authority reasonably. The older guardians are utterly destructive, selfish, obsessive. Underlying the action of masquerade is the idea that through acting one can save oneself. Ms Airey felt the play’s presentation of good sense and romantic fidelity in the central characters disconnects actors from the charge of prostitution (selling themselves).

Misty Anderson was the respondent and said that in Centlive liberty is a core value. She summed up Ms Ingrisani’s paper thus: emotional susceptibility is not entirely negative (gambling is an emotionally drenching experience). The depiction of the gambler is part of the history of the depiction of the reformed rake: excess is turned on itself but it “re-inscribes” [makes visible?] uncontrollable passions. Ms Gollapudi’s paper: more psychological terrain, makes a powerful case for considering the history of the invention of addiction (we move from Hogarth’s disease of the will to Methodist’s brain-searing). Gender gets in the way as Lady Reveller cannot be a slave as she is not free & in the end is indistinguishable from social norms; Valeria is obsessed with science; her character is just not convincing. Ms Airey’s paper: acting itself part of the agenda for liberty; a provisional self challenges patriarchal power and belongs to Butler’s discourse of the self as performer, re-assembling the self for social life.

2005 Bold Stroke for a Wife: Illinois Wesleyan University

Ms Anderson seemed though to object to the empathy and idea that rebellion gives liberty and pleasure: what do we do with actors around us who act with less liberal tendencies? Ms Ingisani defended the breaking out; but, asked Ms Anderson, is not this a risk, a danger making someone susceptible to a conservative person’s resentment? Valere is a psychological portrait but we see he’s a victim to an economic system. To Ms Gollapudi’s paper, MS Anderson said the will is not something individual, women can realize themselves through social manipulation; we don’t believe men have self-mastery (or autonomy) either. Ms Airey wants to show Centlivre defends the theater as a place of moral reformation.

Ms Anderson then asked what is the difference between Behn’s and Centlivre’s characters. Centlivre claims liberty through enacting performance; Behn’s characters perform hedonism plainly, not an act. Centlivre’s characters exist in a deeply unjust situation where you choose one trap over another; we can see some freedom if we see that signing a contract does not enslave us ontologically.

It was a brilliant response, show-offy too. My demur (which I voiced in the discussion afterward) is that if you obey the social conventions these will prevent you from enacting radical freedoms which may over-ride and erase contracts if the whole society agrees eventually to change. To worry about the risk of vengeful conservative people about you, made me think of Marianne Dashwood’s reply to Elinor who claimed freedom of understanding even if her behavior was under subjection that this ends up in subservience. And in another dialogue that “we are all offending every moment of our lives” no matter what we do (S&S I:13 & 17). The compromise Ms Anderson suggested ends up in supporting the establishment, not changing it and keeps everyone unfree.

Would it were that every session I ever went to at a conference came near the interest of this one.

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Again at 8:00 am, now Saturday morning, a really worthwhile seesion on Charlotte Smith’s poetry (which I love (155, “Unromantic Charlotte Smith”).

Charlotte Smith by George Dance

Regulas Allen (“‘Rightly to spell of every herb hat sips the dew: Chaos and classification in the poetry of Charlotte Smith”) found the pervasive theme in Smith’s poetry is displacement, exile, a failure of boundaries, mourning over disorder, nothing can be securely in a place. She approaches plants in a scientific spirit, telling the species of plant, categorizing them using Linnaeus to try to impose an order on chaos which the notes to the poems continually undermine. In her life she knew continual disasters from the time of her marriage; abject terrorizing powerless misery as a women with a violent ruthless failure of a husband. She remembered her childhood as a time of wealth, innocence, contentment; her refusal to relinquish her class pretensions meant she had to make large enough sums of money to support gentility and a good future for 9 children too so she had to write for publication continually. She produced 10 novels and many editions of poetry. Her apparently learned study of Linneaus, geology (Erasmus Darwin), botany, her notes at the bottom of her texts, were not done to show off but as a way of finding order in nature. She’s not plagiarizing but situating her work in time and against the savagery of society (as in footnotes telling of pirates brutality).

Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening

Huge vapors brood above the difted shore,
Night on the ocean settles, dark and mute,
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows, on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone
Singing the hour, and bidding “Strike the bell.”
All is black shadow, but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Mislead the pilgrim-such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends, in life’s long darkling way.

Her poetry has a continuity. In the sonnets and Beachy Head we find traumatic displacement, or geographical violent shifts, corpses adrift in tides, emblematic landscapes of despair. She finds deep-time geology registered in a Middleton churchyard; couples cruelly parted; if she presents a shepherd she looks at the ground he walks on, many presences sleep unremembered there. In her Emigrants we find a French lady and her children, a female exiled from her husband, born to affluence; the channel waters, England and France dissolve into one; in Beachy Head the cliffs register the sudden violence of time, shells high up show continental shifts; it ends on a hermit in a sea cave who tries to make his place but cannot. Late in life the botany and zoology of her Rural Walks show her turning to order, contrasting what has been learned in the new science to peasant cultures she has known. It’s an escapist pursuit, a resource for someone sick at heart, provides calm to a wounded mind. She does not just think of herself and hers: her poetry is about the instability and harshnesses of experience for others too.

Greta River Bridge by John Sell Cotman (1782-1842)

Ruth Knezevich talked of “Charlotte Smith’s “Antiquarian Pursuits in Beachy Head.” Ms Knezevich wants to understand the history and philosophy we find in this poem. The narrator’s literary voice presents the past tangibly by narrating a history (including going back to a castle of Stephen of Blois) that reflects the invasions and evolutions across the island (with relics) and the globe. People are in a local place but that’s the micro-level. She records names, places, events that make a wider perspective. We are invited actively to participate in the geological landscape and history. Her use of annotations is innovative; she distinguishes botany from Shakespearean perspective. She uses them to authorize her text and embed it in the writing of her era. The poem ends in brief rhapsody. She can be distinguished from romanticism by her concrete particularism and brings out the duality (intertwining?) of history with a literary voice. She wants her text to be respected, with her roots in 18th century traditions which go back (as in Warton’s history of poetry) back to the middle ages.

Lisa Ottum also discussed “Unromantic History in Beachy Head.” In her own era she was attacked for imitation; in our time Beachy Head is seen as central and romantic. Ms Ottum saw the poem as part of a debate about history’s effects, moving from past the cliffs to Asia, from the countryside to pre-historic time, from geology to cosmopolitanism. Smith has read Fergusson and Kames, Hume and Gibbon, and followed the changes in historical writing. She looked to the past to understand the present, to private life too, seen in larger social movements. Historians wanted to learn about manners and customs of people as well as statecraft. In Beachy Head she could find a proximate perspective to bring the moral imagination to bear. The poem is preoccupied with departed happiness which is fleeting, unsustainable. She uses temporal shifts in perspective, with a surplus of emotion. All things will collapse away into nothingness; after contemplation of large disasters, she has smaller pictures of cottages. The mind then rests on local peaceful moments. The poem draws on Cowper’s Task, anticipates Mont Blanc, where mediating power of the poet copes with vast powerful teaming worlds.

A cover illustration for Radcliffe’s Udolpho: in prose she too register the cataclysms of time and history

We had a fine discussion afterward. It ranged from asking what were Smith’s sources to when the people first encountered Smith and what editions they first saw her work in. I asked if she was influenced by Scott’s Antiquary and we talked of his Old Mortality and Scott’s use of history, chronicles and antiquarianism. What geology did Smith read? I thought of the poets and text of Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. We discussed when Smith was first identified as a romantic (by Wordsworth, and again in the 1970s), the long period where most of her works fell out of print and no one discussed her. What a change since the mid-1980s and the feminist movement which was essentially responsible for bringing her back.

For “Women and the late 18th century gothic, see continuation in comments.

The novel has a famous scene of a wild hurricane flood over a vast cliff (mocked by Austen in her letters — but recalled)

Ellen

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Helen McMurran’s Spread of Novels, applies Bellos’s Fish in your Ear theory

To translate seemed to me a beautiful thing to do — Victorine de Chastenay on her beginning Radcliffe’s Udolpho

La Coeur et la raison: title of Goubert’s translation of S&S, so the allusion is to Pascal’s La cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas [The heart has its reasons, that the reason doesn't know]

Dear friends and readers,

I send along a brief review of Helen McMurran’s significant book. Her argument implies that creative and attentively alive linguistic translations as well as translations that paid close attention to changing the text to something acceptable to the targt culture were at the core of the spread of the novel across Europe.

Next up will be a two part evaluative review of Pierre Goubert’s study of Jane Austen: he finds out the traits of her mind and character as shown in the books and letters, and has himself written one of the powerful accurate translations of her book into French: La Coeur et la Raison, a translation that enables me to approach Austen’s text afresh the way Ang Lee’s great film adaptation (1995), together with Davies’ 2008 imitation also function. Goubert is much closer in spirit to Austen.

Then I’ll return to Austen’s letters, probably beginning with just Letter 95 (Jane from Henrietta Street, to Cassandra, at Godmersham, 3 Nov 1813).

What troubles me about the reviews of this book is most reviewers seem not to have bothered to read carefully enough to present its arguments about translation or simply (as usual) don’t care about translation studies to see its significance. Her views are consonant with David Bellos which a recent review of Virginia Woolf’s collaborative translations from the Greek with S. S. Koteliansky show hardly anyone takes into serious consideration. The writer found her alterations of Koteliansky deeply effective but had to dismiss it as not accurate, so wrote a muddled even puzzled account of the Hogarth project.

McMurran’s book is presented as having dual purpose: it also explains how novels spread and that was probably what attracted reviewers and a publisher as it’s what was mostly discussed by the reviews I read. The images in this blog are of translations of Austen into French from her own era. See Francophone Jane for listing.

This is Isobel de Montolieu’s translation: it contains her preface, a short life, and the whole of her text.

McMurran traces the history of translation in the 18th century. She argues that translation in the 18th century either refused to obey the norms of earlier translations which meant to obey the norms of classical culture as if it were universal; translations were also original (or idiosyncratic, depending on your perspective) in how they obeyed the target language’s literary norms (3). An influential study by Venuti divides translation types into domesticating or foreignizing. She says this division fails to take into account another way of thinking about translation. Before the 18th century the point of translating a text was to transmit it, and often the original and translated texts were used as learning tools.

Foreign language at the time was taught by method like Latin: silent, translating; in school texts we see words placed against one another as equivalents (9). (For my part I think this kind of study still essential in learning a new language.) You were transmitting the Latin and Greek (through Latin); your purpose to render and transmit; you produced what was understood and re-valued in original; you are engaging with, imitating, bringing up to date revered originals. There were classicists who did argue that a given text was not translatable, by which they meant it was necessarily at as good as the original. Such an argument would never be made when it came to Malory’s translations of 5 French romances into his romance epic of Arthurian Tales because the French texts were not respected (often not known). But it was applied in the case of Homer and Virgil especially. Now putting them into vernacular meant you were supposed to convey the essence of the author as you filtered it in your idiom. So Johnson complains that Pope loses the wild savage essence of Homer.

This Archipoche edition gives the complete and unaltered early 19th century translation of Austen’s MP as Les Trois Cousins by Henri Villemain.

In the later 17th century the historical sense was beginning to emerge, just glancingly but it was coming. People became aware that older texts were from another time and culture and the distance between themselves and this earlier time. They begin to update texts. The most infamous examples are the Shakespeare alterations in drama. 18th century scholars continue to see the much revered texts as partly timeless — not wholly as the verse imitations by Pope of Horace and Johnson of Juvenal show. But they never see the texts written in their own time as timeless. When they translate texts in their own time, they are not reviving or renewing. Translaters begin to see themselves as enriching their own readerships of their particular nation and language by translation. Literary translation becomes a transnational exchange; texts are seen as representative of a nation

Think of the difference between Curtius’s European Literature and Latin Middle Ages and Auerbach’s Mimesis

A very important sub-argument of this book is that translation in the era was not seen as hackwork. She has a long section showing simply that most translations we have were done of out love of a text, interest in it. Yes there were hacks, but they are in the minority because so badly paid. She suggests this sort of motive persists to our time.

It’s certainly true of Feneon’s Catherine Morland for Northanger Abbey which by chance, talent, perhaps spiritual affinity made this anarchist’s French text a genuine match for Austen’s:

The historical sense changed the way texts themselves were viewed in histories of the novel. Early histories of novel, starting from later 17th century just assumed earlier novels were written out of a universal impulse to tell a love or adventure story. They would connect texts across centuries and make no effort to discover if there was any author of the particularities of a time or place. De Sade’s history is the first person to look at circumstances and say the one romance comes from one culture and time and another from another. Scott developed this into an important insight: he was the first to begin to look at texts as forming national identity. Watt sidesteps all this to begin with new definition of novel that takes us back to universal aesthetic impulses (divided into neat binaries). But he too (McMurran does not say this) begins with this assumption there was something new in the 18th century which made a break with the past.

McMurran’s book may be a companion to Moretti’s Atlas of the Novel, showing us how much novels at the time represent an interaction between the French and English. But more importantly it’s an application of Bellos’s perspective on translation.

An anonymous 1816 translation of Emma, included in Valerie Cossy’s JA in Switzerland

McMurran tells us how trawling through catalogues tells us so little about the books — how nebulous and hard it is to make any sense of these catalogues, first pages, what little information is available and paratexts — and erects it into an understanding of the era as polymormous, as being indifferent to who the author was as they could not know. It was not until much later that it was admitted texts were changed to suit a political point of view, to sell to the taste of a public. Cossy’s book is an attempt to delve the people who produced the French translations of Austen, their political and personal views, and that of their immediate audience. It takes a long book to analyze just a couple of Austen’s translations (Montolieu, excepts from Pride and Prejudice) this way.

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This is Eloise Perks’s 1822 text unchanged

She then moves into the translations themselves. It’s interesting to see (from what evidence we do have) that in the early parts of the 18th century 30-35% of fiction read in the UK were translations from French, but as century wore on less and less translations, there were more indigenous English texts in the UK. In France the proportions move the other way: little translation from the English until mid-way and then a flood of English texts translated into French begins, but these English texts were (it’s important to recall) naturalized, made to reflect French aesthetic and moral ideals.

This is Isobel de Montolieu’s text unchanged; unfortunately Helen Seyres has altered Montolieu’s text (as well as title, to Raisons et Sentiments) for Archipoche, making the reprint worthless

McMurran then turns to “rendering practices” in prose fiction. She explains that she ascertained what 18th century translators did when they departed from their text. Well it depends and was individual, but two common resorts are amplification to make more vivid, or condensing to make more forceful. I’ve found that later is typical for the two good male French translators of Radcliffe, Soules and Morellet (and sometime also for the poorer ones, Moylin and Fourier, but they might do that for anyone). Amplification allows for change of perspective such as we see in Smith’s Prevost and condensing such as we see in Chastenay’s Udolpho.

Behn then studies Eliza Haywood’s translations. I did not know that Haywood translated a lot (as did Behn) and I cannot resist thinking both did it for money. Haywood looks to heighten the impression of the text. My respect for her went up when I learned that that she translated Boiguibert’s Marie Stuart, Reyne d’Escosse, Nouvelle Historique, Mary Stuart was an attraction to Madame de Lafayette too (in her Princess de Cleves as the wife of Francoise). Haywood wrote about her methods justifying them Apparently many have thought her Mary Stuart an original book; she also wrote a fictionalized biography, The Life of Madam De Villesache, but this one she presented as a translation.

This real interest in French reminds me of Aphra Behn’s really fine work in French which only recently has gotten some attention (mostly libertine love poetry).

Quite career for Eliza Haywood as a translator. What’s interesting is how she deviates from her texts. Most of the time I dislike her fiction intensely (even her more domestic later fiction) which I find sarky and heartless or crudely didactic — it matters to me what her strength is exercised for; but here she emerges with a certain humanity. I did not know she translated a good deal of Prevost’s Memoirs of a Man of Quality; this is astonishing really.

McMurran then has a matching section on La Place as a French translator of English texts; his translation of Oroonoko influential; he sympathizes intensely with the African characters as native Caribs in a history of Imoinda; he manages to go outside a Eurocentric view of these characters according to McMurran.

About mid-point in her book the cross-channel emergence of the novel becomes her topic. Again she sees translations as central; part of this was the emergence of the nation state, for the first time the idea a language is not easily translated into another because of cultural differences is voiced regularly. McMurran loos at de-nationalizing strands too and turns to look at Richardson’s novels in translation.

It’s here I left off, but will return eventually, but again I interested to see a new perspective (so many have studied Clarissaand Richardson in translation you see). The new perspective informs Robert Frail’s more recent enquiry into transation, A Singular Duality which again is defeated by reviewers who remain wedded to the idea a translation is first and foremost a crib of a specific text. See Gillian Dow. “A Singular Duality: Literary Relations Between France and England in the Eighteenth Century (review).” Translation and Literature 17.1 (2008): 127-131. Project MUSE. Web. 26 Feb. 2013. .

The modern Pleiade texts

McMurran begins with the idea that a national cosmospolitanism characterized the outlook of readers and translators alike in the 18th century; people read the second language of either English or France while they were in Europe. As there was intense hostility between France (and hence French and French book) and the UK (books in English) so there was also intense admiration. This too describes some of the motives for translating central to the function and nature of translated texts in the era.

A still from Victor Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise, an appropriation of Austen’s Northanger Abbey: the image resembles a common motif in women’s painting (e.g., Jane Freilicher).
Ellen

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For Jane Austen’s birthday

John Everett Millais (1829-96), Walking and Talking

Dear friends and readers,

How can we remember her best this anniversary? Last year I put a poem she wrote for her birthday in 1808: it’s the only year that we have a record showing that her remembering her birthday: on December 16th, 1804 her good friend, Anna Lefroy died from a fall from a horse, and four years later, Jane wrote an elegy on the occasion of her friend’s death: “The day returns again, my natal day;/What mix’d emotions with the Thought arise!”

It’s a deeply emotional poem, a kind she wrote a few times. For example, this one to Anna Austen Lefroy, with lines like “Let not thy heart be blighted by the feeling/That presses on thy soul, of utter loneliness.” Or on her migraine headache just around the time of the publication of Sense and Sensibility: “When stretch’d out on one’s bed/With a fierce throbbing head” or the seething passion of the poem she wrote a day before she died, asserting immortality: “When once we are buried you think we are gone/But behold me immortal!”

She does not call the day her birthday but her “natal day” and a search through all her searchable texts on line (the six famous novels) showed that she never used either word in her novels, nor do I remember any reference to a birthday of a character or a birthday in her letters as a day to celebrate. In her novels she does tell us enough to work out birth years for some of her characters and for a smaller group enough to make a guess as to which part of the year or near which month, but the lacuna suggests that usually she did not think such chance happenings (it’s a chance what day one is born, to some extent a chance what day one marries) important. The coincidence of her friend’s death occurring the day she was born prompts her one birthday poem.

So, I thought a poem which puts before us felicitiously what she thought important, an attitude that shaped her writing and maybe her decisions in life would be most fitting. What is it Jane Bennet says to Elizabeth upon being told Elizabeth means to marry Mr Darcy: “Oh Lizzy! do anything rather than marry without affection” (P&P III:17). Emma Watson cries out to Elizabeth her sister in their first conversation: “I would rather be a teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like” (The Watsons 1st section). Or Austen explaining to a niece why she had encouraged her to think of marrying someone: “tho’ I did not think you then so much in love as you thought yourself, I did consider you as being attached in a degree — quite sufficiently for happiness; and then upon the girl showing her feelings were much “cooler” than even Austen supposed and perhaps preferred someone else: “nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound to one without love, bound to one & preferring another” (JA’s Letters 109 & 114, 18-20 Nov & 30 Nov 1814).

A genuine congenial, a tenderly affectionate companionate relationship (as we might say) which includes respect, trust and constancy that is what her heroines seek, and the poem from the 18th century I know which best expresses this ideal (and in anniversary form) is Samuel Bishop’s “To his wife, on the sixteenth anniversary of her Wedding day with a Ring”

THEE, Mary, with this ring I wed,’
So sixteen years ago I said –
Behold another ring! ‘for what?’
To wed thee o’er again? — Why not?
With that first ring I married youth,
Grace, beauty, innocence, and truth;
Taste long admir’d, sense long rever’d,
And all my Molly then appear’d.
If she, by merit since disclosed,
Prove twice the woman I supposed,
I plead that double merit now,
To justify a double vow.

Here then to-day, (with faith as sure,
With ardour as intense, as pure,
As when, amidst the rites divine,
I took thy troth, and plighted mine)
To thee, sweet girl, my second ring
A token and a pledge I bring;
With this I wed, till death us part,
Thy riper virtues to my heart;
Those virtues which, before untried,
The wife has added to the bride:
Those virtues, whose progressive claim,
Endearing wedlock’s very name,
My soul enjoys, my song approves,
For conscience’ sake, as well as love’s.
And why?–They shew me every hour
Honour’s high thought, affection’s power,
Discretion’s deed, sound judgment’s sentence, –
And teach me all things — but repentance.

Samuel Bishop (1731–95), headmaster and poet, married Mary Palmer (a relative) in 1763, so this poem was written in 1779, four years after Austen was born. They had at least one daughter to whom Bishop also wrote loving poems. Mary survived him and married his biographer, Rev Thomas Clare who also published the majority of Bishop’s poems (1796). Bishop wrote prolifically but had published only a few poems before he died.

Reader I give you Jane Austen, 237 years after she was born, a toast to her … What she would have said of this cult I hesitate to imagine …

John Singer Sergeant (1856-1925), Two Wineglasses (1925)

Ellen

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Foremother poet: Annette Von Droste-Hulshoff (1797-1848): The Jew’s Beech

Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840), Sylphide

Dear friends and readers,

About a week ago we finished a lightning-quick absorbed (for those who participated) reading and discussion of Annette von Droste-Hulshoff’s one work still in print: The Jew’s Beech (first published in 1842), during which we also albeit briefly discussed her life and poetry. She was an important (rare) early 19th century German lyric poet (so foremother poet), and in the way of advertising familiarizations one reads her work and life represent a kind of intersection between the passion and content of Emily Bronte, with her retired life resembling that of Emily Dickinson.

I’ll do one better and suggest her autobiographical novel, Ledwina (which I was able to read a portion of, Englished by Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop in Bitter Healing: German Women Writers, 1700-1830) depicted her restricted choices and liberty and all-encompassing apparently kind but repressive family makes me think of Austen:

she so loathed this sad and anxious sheltering, this pitiful cautious life where the body governs the spirit until it, too, becomes as infirm and impoverished as the body itself, loathed it so much that she would gladly have let all her life’s energy, which was glimmering out a spark at a time, flare up and expire in a single blaze

We see her daily life, and as in Austen’s letters, her close relationships with servants. There are strikingly modern passages: for example the heroine grows irritated with herself when she falls asleep (partly tiredness, partly boredom) during the day because as it is she can

scarcely sleep at night; then I get up from time to time and walk about my room; it’s not good for me, but what is one to do with the long night.

What indeed?

Her continual rewriting and perfectionist stance towards each detail of her text recalls Austen too.

*******************
To begin with her life:

Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, 1838 portrait by J. Sprick

Annette von Drost-Hulshoff may be said to be a rare women represented in the German romantic canon, but like so many women before the 19th century, it’s hard to get at the truth of her life. What I have read amounts to two different lives.

Take your choice:

Her birthplace, Burg Hülshoff in Havixbeck, Germany

at wikipedia and from the articles cited you will learn of a woman who was ambitious, wanted a career (planned her publications to make an image) and was thwarted by her family, the prescriptive life laid down for an upper class Catholic German unmarried woman, and bad luck. Her father was learned and gave his daughter an excellent high culture education (tutors in ancient languages, French, natural history, mathematics and music (she inherited considerable musical talent from her father).

We are told she was a member of her brother’s intellectual circles, knew Grimm, Goethe, Schiller and many other illustrious German names. She almost married a Protestant, but was cruelly tricked out of it when family members persuaded a Catholic lawyer to pay court to her. The end result was her reputation was hurt, she presumably shocked by this treachery.

Her father’s death, religious doubts, and her family’s wealth enabled her to live a life of quiet retreat with her mother and family and study and write poetry in the countryside. She wrote long-narrative poems but her work was not marketed skilfully (a backwater publishers) and the commercial failure humiliated her.

But again she tries for a social life, this time a salon in Munster where she meets Levin Schücking, a young poet, whose friendship, sympathy, congeniality inspire her to write again: poetry, The Jew’s Beech. Schucking has to take a position as a tutor in an aristocratic family. New contacts led to a literary success, an invitation by Clara Schuman to write a libretto, but she was betrayed by Schucking who, now married, writes two novels, one exposing the flaws of the aristocracy she belonged to, the other with a portrait of herself that distressed (she is said to have treated the poet like a son), so again she retires, this time to small house by herself and dies of TB. Nonetheless, Schucking was himself responsible for publicizing her work.

Or the life as told by Blackwell and Zantopp (Bitter Healing) and suported by Ledwina (written 1819-26):

The Säntis, a mountain in the Alps near Schloss Eppishausen, which inspired Droste’s poem “Der Säntis”

Blackwell and Zantop present Drost-Hulfshoff or Annette as not wanting to have her works published, as reclusive, quiet, and the story of the thwarted love affair becomes not so much a manipulation of her as her being over-sensitive and alienated or different from most of those she met, unconventional in her perceptions, and drawn inwardly by her religious feelings and love for travel and long sojourns in a wild romantic Westphalia landscape. Her relationships were all with family members or close friends; important to her were a Professor Anton Matthias Sprickman of Munster, a woman writer of popular tales, Katharina Brusch, and Adele Schopenhauer (the famous Schopenhauer’s mother who wrote her of travel in the UK). When young, Annette chose to turn away from her brother’s friends (now they are boorish students); she rejected one man who denounced her as arrogant and manipulative. They describe her poetry effectively (inward, intense, her marshes and moors inhabited by demonic nature spirits), some prose works (Pictures from Westphalia, 1842), two unfinished novels (one Englished as Our Country Place, begun 1841).

Both accounts depict her as an isolated and independent woman in character who was often ill: her heroine Ledwina suffers from severe chest pains; she has a widowed mother who has to give up her estate to an unworthy son, sisters desperate to marry but wanting to remain close to one another, a woman who goes mad with shame when she is left a bankrupt widow, another who renounces speech for 14 years to be able to live with her husband. It is an account of un-freedom, a lack of social worth accorded women. The Jew’s Beech presents women in the same light.

*********************

Friedrich, Abbey in the Oakwood

The Jew’s Beech, another Scheherazade tale:

I can find no plot-summary, but there is an account of the story’s sources in Drost-Hulshoff’s relatives’ experience of peasant culture and court cases recorded by them (see August von Haxthausen) The prosaic feel of everyday life, the anger and greed and competitiveness within families, occasional violence, the pragmaticism which nonetheless accepts superstitions reminded me much of the world of Martin Guerre as described by Charlotte Smith and Natalie Zemon Davis.

Basically it tells us of the lives of a few people who live amid and participate in a fierce smuggling and destruction of timber going on in the local rich woods and lands owned by the wealthy by bands of men desperate to make a living. We are told of foresters who are hired as murderous police on behalf of the state and grandees (who want to protect the game and “their” woods). In effect an unackknowledged all-out war between the haves and have-nots goes on ceaselessly in the background and every once in a while individual people erupt to murder and avenge themselves for humilation or because someone owes them money (or something else) and didn’t pay up.

The translation by Lionel and Doris Thomas (reprinted in an Oxford paperback classic) held me because it was rendered in modern lucid idiomatic fluid English. It reads as a startlingly modern fable (rather like a unusually plain Isak Dinesen story) so I expect the translator is part of the new school of translators (pressured to do this by publishers) which modernizes older texts by getting rid of certain kinds of idiosyncracies of the original author or the period. The packaging reminded me of Wolf’s historical fiction set in the same era about the poets Kleist and Gunderrode, Englished as No Place on Earth: the prose style here is the same. It may be that one or both of these texts is distorted.

So, we have a fearful world of peasants seen by a narrator kept at a distance. Violence is the way they control one another and the novel suggests things like drunken beatings, the intense concern with money and surviving as the main motive for people’s actions without admitting it. Margret the mother, loves her son, Frederich, but unhesitatingly lets the uncle take him away to work for him though it seems to me that the uncle is as fierce as Peter Grimes and I would not trust my son with him.

Oddly (again referring to Wolf’s historical fiction) I felt it was sort of an 18th century tale told much later – the way women are said to write in a belated way. It opens in 1738 with the birth of the young hero, Frederick,moves backward to the mother and her bad decision to marry a violent man (but then she was single and it’s said ugly) and then forward to Frederick as a young man — who can be dandy like, sensitive dreamy but also a determined bourgeois. It jumps forward once to July 1756, again four years and ends 28 years later (1788).

Charlotte Smith’s Romance of Real Life shows us how the legal and economic arrangements of the ancien regime create hatred and resentment and can lead to murder. What’s on Drost-Hulshoff’s mind is precisely this. The first three pages gives us the framework:

As a result of primitive and often inadequate lesiglature, the ideas of the inhabitants as to right and wrong had become somewhat confused, or rather beside the official legal system there had grown up a second law based on public opinion, usage and superannuaion arising from neglect … legal form mattered less the spirit was adhered to more strictly, infringements occurred ore often … nothing destroys the soul more surely than an appeal to external legal forms in contradiction to one’s inner sense of justice.

Drost-Hulshoff differs from Smith in emphasizing custom and also the vulnerability of women who do suffer terribly in this tale. As a kind of throw-away detail we are told of how at a wedding where everyone is celebrating, a young woman is being married to a very old man who sneers at her and seems to look forward to domineering and being cruel to her. The first time we meet Friedrich’s mother she has decided to marry a man (Friedrich’s father) who we have seen be somehow hideously cruel to his first wife so that she flees from him in the night all bloody and thereafter lives with her parents and not soon after that dies. Friedrich’s mother receives the same treatment from this man who we are told makes an exception for his son, which makes his son tender to the father.

It ends enigmatically. There are two murders and after the first murder was committed I was convinced that Friedrich had not done it. He was an accomplice with the lumber thieves, but not the prime actor. After the second the murder of the lender Jew Aaron (who is presented anti-semitically), as he had humiliated Friedrich, I thought he had done at least that one (though it’s never stated), and then when his corpse is found by the Jew’s beech tree, although it was implied that after years of exile and flight, he had returned and killed himself near where the Jew he killed died, I was not sure.

I am particularly struck by her originality and unconventionality. How different this is from the sentimental pirate and other tales of the French at the time. I thought of Marmontel’s Shepherdess of the Alps, but also the tales of sensibility of Germane de Stael. It is wholly alien in the way of Emily Bronte’s stances.

******************

Johan Christian Claussen Dah (1788-1856), Dresden by Moonlight (1850)

We had some very good talk and I’d like to include some of the postings of two friends on WWTTA. Fran, a reader of German, very knowledgeable in its literature, wrote as quietly brilliantly as she usually does:

Glad you’re enjoying this hauntingly puzzling tale, Ellen. I’ve already re-read the German text and the notes in my new edition, so I’ll try and make time to see how the English translation compares with the original as well. I’ll probably be using the older online translation, though.

You’ll probably have seen from other sources that Droste-Hülshoff based her story on true events, ones that her ancestors had been involved in. The historical murder took place on 10.2.1783 when Soestmann-Behrens, a so-called ‘Schutzjude’(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzjude), was killed by Hermann Georg Winkelhagen, a farm worker from Bellersen (the B. in the text) after an argument about an unpaid bill.Though Droste-Hülshoff purposedly clouds the issue of who actually murdered the Jewish merchant in her text, there seems to have been no such doubt as to Winkelhagen’s own guilt.

At the time, D-H’s maternal grandfather (some sources say great-grandfather) Caspar Moritz von Haxthausen zu Abbenburg, an aristocratic landowner, was also serving as judge at the patrimonial court in charge of the case, so the details were passed down in family lore.

Like the assumed murderer in D-H’s story, Winkelhagen fled capture, but in the course of his adventures was picked up by pirates and sold into Algerian slavery. This lasted until 1805, when he and 231 fellow prisoners were freed by Jérôme, Napoleon’s brother. Winkelhagen then made his way back to Bellersen, arriving in April 1806, only to hang himself later in the woods on 18.9.1806.

From these dates, you can see that D-H did choose to set her own story further back in time as you thought.

It’s interesting that you should mention the sentimental pirate tales popular at the time since D-H.’s uncle August had already published a version of Winkelhagen’s story under the title of ‘The Story of an Algerian Slave’ in 1818, which played up the pirate and slavery scenario much more.

I’ve read that version, too, as it was in the notes. It’s a much more
straightforward, unambiguous account, though the Algerian side of the events as described there are actually held to be almost entirely fictitious, written perhaps to cash in on the wave of interest you indicate, whilst the details of the murder itself seem to have been more solidly based on the surviving details of the original case.

Since the subject of anti-semitism has already come up, it was interesting to read there that Winkelhagen had first been taken to court by Soestmann-Behrens for defaulting on payment of some cloth and that W. had expected to be let off since his accuser was ‘just’ a Jew. He wasn’t: the court found in favour of his accuser and W. retaliated by violence. When he returned from slavery, the matter of whether to prosecute the murder came up again, but it was deemed that his 24 years of exile, imprisonment and forced labour had already been punishment enough.

Interestingly enough, Droste-Hülshoff didn’t read her uncle’s version until after she had written all or most of her own story and, whilst she notes wanting to introduce some of the details he mentioned that she had initially forgotten, she also mentions not wanting to re-write the whole thing, underlining in particular how very different her fictional portrayal of the supposed murderer was from her uncle’s portrayal of the historical W.

She actually did revise this short tale again again over a long period of time, perhaps because it was one of her first adventures into prose. There seem to be eight, extant, much revised drafts or manuscript versions, which makes establishing an accurate text history pretty difficult.

This process of constant revision might also be the reason why this is her only completed prose text, whilst the rest remain as mere fragments.

Continued in the comments where I end with two lyrics and a bibliography.

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve chosen Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) for this week’s foremother poet because when I’ve come across any of her poems, I find them so just, humane, so lucid and appealing in tone, and this past couple of weeks, the world as depicted in the public media has been so demoralizing and (as it were) intent on harm; her perspective is wide-ranging and (while she does not give the personal details of her life in such a way as to differentiate herself from others) intimate, and explicitly politically aware. Personal generosity and strength align themselves as traits with knowing how hard life is. I haven’t presented her before because I don’t know that much personally about her (see “A life” in the comments) and find it difficult to present her poems in a blog because she uses spaces within lines between words and indents irregularly to make stanzas.

But it just seemed so wrong to set up a page for the women’s canon, and not have Rukeyser among the 20th century voices.

I begin with a direct seemingly personal statement I find visceral and then a stanzaic address capturing a general vision of stratified cities made out of indifference:

Effort at Speech Between Two People

Speak to me.     Take my hand.     What are you now?
I will tell you all.     I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a
rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair:
a pink rabbit:     &it was my birthday, and a candle
burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be
happy.

Oh, grow to know me.     I am not happy.     I will
be open:
Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like
music,
like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm
about me.
There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

Speak to me.     Take my hand.     What are you now?
When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,
fluid: and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.
I want now to be close to you.     I would
link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your
days.

I am not happy.     I will be open.
I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet
poems.
There has been fear in my life.     Sometimes I
speculate
On what a tragedy his life was, really.

Take my hand.     Fist my mind in your hand.     What
are you now?
When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
and I stood a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward
death:
if the light had not melted clouds and plains to
beauty,
if light had not transformed that day, I would have
leapt,
I am unhappy.     I am lonely.     Speak to me.
I will be open.     I think he never loved me:
he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
he said with a gay mouth:     I love you.      Grow to
know me.

What are you now?     If we could touch you another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . .yesterday
I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand.     Speak
to me

Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Frozen Assets (1930)

Ballad of Orange and Grape

After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you’re read your reading
after you’ve written your say –
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and across the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century.

Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack–
sticking out of the crummy garage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who’d like to break your back.
But here’s a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose andpink, too.

Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog-man leans –
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking.

I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked ORANGE
orange in the one marked GRAPE,
the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
and orange drink in the GRAPE.
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, on each machine.

I ask him: How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? –
How can they write and believe what they’re writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE –?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write and we hear and we say and we do?)

He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be white and black women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not be, what we do and what we don’t do.

On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE,
pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.

Kathe Kollwitz 91867-1945), Woman with her Dead Child

A poem to a fellow greatw woman artist:

From “Kathe Kollwitz”

II.

Women, as gates, saying:
“The process is after all, like music:
like the development of a piece of music.
The fugues come back and
          again and again
interweave.
A theme may seem to have been put aside,
but it keeps returning—
the same thing modulated,
somewhat changed in form.
Usually richer.
And it is very good that this is so.”

A woman pouring her opposites.
“After all there are happy things in life too.
Why do you show only the dark side?”
“I could not answer this. But I know–
in the beginning my impulse to know
the working life
          had little to do with
pity or sympathy.
I simply felt that the life of the workers was beautiful.”

She said, “I am groping in the dark.”

She said, “When the door opens, of sensuality,
then you will understand it too. The struggle begins.
Never again to be free of it,
often you will feel it to be your enemy.
Sometimes
I you will almost suffocate,
such joy it brings.”

Saying of her husband:
“My wish I is to die after Karl.
I know no person who can love as he can,
with his whole soul.
Often this love has oppressed me;
I wanted to be free.
But often too it has made me I so terribly happy.”

She said : “We rowed over to Carrara at dawn,
climbed up to the marble quarries
and rowed back at night. The drops of water
fc!l like glittering stars
from our oars.”

She said: “As a matter of fact,
I believe
          that bisexuality
is almost a necessary factor
in artistic production; at any rate,
the tinge of masculinity within me
helped me
          in my work.”

She said : “The only technique I can still manage.
It’s hardly a technique at all, lithography.
In it
          only the essentials count.”

A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night
          saying to me:
“Kollwitz? She’s too black-and-white.”

Ill

Held among wars, watching
all of them
all these people
weavers,
Carmagnole

Looking at
all of them
death, the children
patients in waiting-rooms
famine
the street
the corpse with the baby
floating, on the dark river

A woman seeing
the violent, inexorable
movement of nakedness
and the confession of No
the confession of great weakness, war,
all streaming to one son killed, Peter;
even the son left living; repeated,
the father, the mother; the grandson
another Peter killed in another war; firestorm;
dark, light, as two hands,
this pole and that pole as the gates.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open ….

4 Song: The Calling-Up

Rumor, stir of ripeness
rising within this girl
sensual blossoming
of meaning, its light and form.

The birth-cry summoning
out of the male, the father
from the warm woman
a mother in response.

The word of death
calls up the fight with stone
wrestle with grief with time
from the material make
an art harder than bronze.

5 Self-Portrait

Month looking directly at you
eyes in their inwardness looking ,
directly at you
ha1f light half darkness
woman, strong, German, young artist
flows into
wide sensual mouth meditating
lookking right at you
eyes shadowed with brave hand
looking deep at you
flows into
wounded brave mouth
grieving and hooded eyes
alive, German, in her first War
flows into
strength of the worn face 2
a skein of lines
broods, flows into
mothers among the war graves
bent over death
facing the father
stubborn upon the field
flows into
the marks of her knowing­_
Nie Wieder Krieg
repeated in the eyes
flows into
“Seedcorn must not be ground”
and the grooved cheek
lips drawn fine
the down-drawn grief
face of our age
flows into
Pieta, mother and
between her knees
life as her son in death
pouring from the sky of
one more war
flows into
face almost obliterated
hand over the mouth forever
hand over one eye now
the other great eye
closed (1971)

Each of the sections of the above poem are descriptions of Kollwitz’s art. I like the repetition of “flows into,” one era, one woman’s grief flowing into the next, the man standing there stubborn.

Rightly famous:

Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The news would pour out of various devices
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

*********************
Muriel Rukeyser’s life is told in a number of places on the Net, from wikipedia, to poetry sites and webpages devoted to her. Her poems are not about her personally, and when she tells of some personal private experience (“Night Feeding”) she generalizes as to include as many people in her revealed world as she can. I notice though she doesn’t stress it, most often her central victim fires are women (Mrs Walpurga); my favorite poems are often the medium length wide line spoken ones

Poem out of Childhood

I
Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry-
Not Angles, angels-and the magnificent past
shot deep illuminations into high-school.
I opened the door into the concert-hall
and a rush of triumphant violins answered me
while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face
intruding upon Brahms. Suddenly, in an accident
the girl’s brother was killed, but her father had just died:
she stood against the wall, leaning her cheek,
dumbly her arms fell, “What will become of me?” and
I went into the corridor for a drink of water.
These bandages of image wrap my head,
when I put my hand up I hardly feel the wounds.
We sat on the steps of the unrented house
raining blood down on Loeb and Leopold
creating again how they removed his glasses
and philosophically slit his throat.
They who manipulated and misused our youth
smearing those centuries upon our hands,
trapping us in a welter of dead names,
snuffing and shaking heads at patent truth.
We were ready to go the long descent with Virgil
the bough’s gold shade advancing forever with us,
entering the populated cold of drawing-rooms;
Sappho, with her drowned hair trailing along Greek waters,
weed binding it, a fillet of kelp enclosing
the temples’ ardent fruit-
Not Sappho, Sacco.
Rebellion, pioneered among our lives,
viewing from far-off many-branching deltas,
innumerable seas.

II
In adolescence I knew travelers
speakers digressing from the ink-pocked rooms,
bearing the unequivocal sunny word.
Prinzip’s year bore us: see us turning at breast
quietly while the air throbs over Sarajevo
after the mechanic laugh of that bullet.
How could they know what sinister knowledge finds
its way among the brain’s wet palpitance
what words would nudge and giggle at the spine
what murders dance?
These horrors have approached the growing child;
now that the factory is sealed-up brick
the kids throw stones, smashing the windows
membranes of uselessness in desolation.
We grew older quickly, watching the father shave
and the splatter of lather harden on the glass,
playing in sand-boxes to escape paralysis,
being victimized by fataller sly things.
“Oh, and you,” he said, scraping his jaw, “What will you be?”
“Maybe-something-like- Joan–of-Arc •.. “
Allies Advance, we see,
Six Miles South to Soissons. And we beat the drums,
Watchsprings snap in the mind, uncoil, relax,
the leafy years all somber with foreign war.
How could we know what exposed guts resembled?
A wave, shocked to motion, babbles margins
from Asia to Far Rockaway, spiralling
among clocks in its four-dimensional circles.
Disturbed by war, we pedalled bicycles
breakneck down the decline, until the treads
conquered our speed, and pulled our feet behind them,
and pulled our heads.
We never knew the war, standing so small
looking at eye-level toward the puttees, searching
the picture-books for sceptres, pennants for truth;
see Galahad unaided by puberty.

Rat-tat a drum upon the armistice,
Kodak As You Go-photo: they danced late,
and we were a generation of grim children
leaning over the bedroom sills, watching
the music and the shoulders and how the war was over,
laughing until the blow on the mouth broke night
wide out from cover.
The child’s curls blow in a forgotten wind,
immortal ivy trembles on the wall:
the sun has crystallized these scenes, and tall
shadows remember time cannot rescind.

III
Organize the full results of that rich past,
open the windows-potent catalyst,
harsh theory of knowledge, running down the aisles,
crying out in the classrooms, March ravening on the plain,
inexorable sun and wind and natural thought.
Dialectically our youth unfolds:
the pale child walking to the river, passional
in ignorance, in loneliness, demanding
its habitations for the leaping dream, kissing
quick air, the vibrations of transient light,
not knowing substance or reserve, walking
in valvular air, each person in the street
conceived surrounded by his life and pain,
fixed against time, subtly by these impaled:
death and that shapeless war. Listening at dead doors,
our youth assumes a thousand differing fleshes
summoning fact from abandoned machines of trade,
knocking on the wall of the nailed-up power-plant,
telephoning hello, the deserted factory, ready
for the affirmative clap of truth
ricocheting from thought to thought among
the childhood, the gestures, the rigid travelers.

Emilio Longoni (1859–1932), Un gatto per amico (a cat for a friend) -1892

**********************
Rukeyser also identified as a Jewish poet and writer. Marilyn Hacker (also Jewish) Hacker wrote of the following two that they are “for Passover” and at the same time “for peoples’ liberation struggles today, as Rukeyser intended it.”

In this time of renewed terror and wrathful destruction of the vulnerable, powerless, poor in our world by the powerful, vicious, wealthy, Rukeyser calls out:

Lives
By Muriel Rukeyser
AKIBA

The Way Out

The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man,
with signs, and his journeys.     Where the rock is split
and speaks to the water;     the flame speaks to the cloud:
the red splatter, abstraction, on the door
speaks to the angel and the constellations.
The grains of sand on the sea floor speak at last to the noon.
And the loud hammering of the land behind
speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs,
we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea.

All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage.

Music of one child carried into the desert;
Firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid.
Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people
Led by the water drawn man to the smoke mountain.
The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs,
The burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening.
Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain.
Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child.
The meaning beginning to move, which is the song.

Music of those who have walked out of slavery.

Into that journey where all things speak to all things
Refusing to accept the curse, and taking
For signs the signs of all things, the world, the body
Which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world,
All creation being created in one image, creation.
This is not the past walking into the future,
the walk is painful, into the present, the dance
not visible as dance until much later.
These dancers are discoverers of God.

We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song.

Out of a life of building lack on lack:
The slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith:
An army who came to the ocean: the walkers
Who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou,
City and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo,
The ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes,
Swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris
And the glass black hearses: those on the Long March:
all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man.

Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world.

Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death
By his disciples carried from Jerusalem
in blackness journeying to find his journey
to whatever he was loving with his life.
The wilderness journey through which we move
Under the whirlwind truth into the new,
The only accurate. A cluster of lights at night:
faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching
while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in.

Barbarian music, a new song.

Acknowledging opened water, possibility:
Open like a woman to this meaning.
In a time of building statues of the stars,
Valuing certain partial ferocious skills
While past us the chill and immense wilderness
Spreads its one-color wings until we know
Rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea,
The world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find.
What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey.

Ways to discover. The song of the way in.

The Witness

Who is the witness? What voice moves across time,
Speaks for the life and death as witness voice?
Moving to night on this city, this river, my winter street?

He saw it, the one witness. Tonight the life as legend
Goes building a meeting for me in the veins of night
Adding its scenes and its songs. Here is the man transformed,

The tall shepherd, the law, the false messiah, all;
You who come after me far from tonight finding
These lives that ask you always Who is the witness –

Take from us acts of encounter we at night
Wake to attempt, as signs, seeds of beginning,
Given from darkness and remembering darkness,

Take from our light given to you our meetings.
Time tells us men and women, tells us You
The witness, your moment covered with signs, your self.

Tells us this moment, saying You are the meeting.
You are made of signs, your eyes and your song.
Your dance the dance, the walk into the present.

All this we are and accept, being made of signs, speaking
To you, in time not yet born.
          The witness is myself.
     And you,
The signs, the journeys of the night, survive.

*Note [by Rukeyser]: These two “Lives” [the other is about Kaethe Kollwitz] are part of a sequence. Akiba is the Jewish shepherd-scholar of the first and second century, identified with the Song of Songs and with the insurrection against Hadrian’s Rome, led in A. D. 132 by Bar Cochba (Son of the Star). After this lightning war, Jerusalem captured, the Romans driven out of the south, Rome increased its military machine; by 135, the last defenses fell, Bar Cochba was killed, Akiba was tortured to death at the command of his friend, the Roman Rufus, and a harrow was drawn over the ground where Jerusalem had stood, leaving only a corner of wall. The story in my mother’s family is that we are descended from Akiba –— unverifiable, but a great gift to a child.

Notes about the poem, by Rabbi Arthur Waskow:

I think this is one of the great poems of the 20th century — surely the greatest American Jewish poem. I encourage that it be read during Passover (it begins with a celebration of the Exodus) and perhaps during the all-night Torah study for Shavuot, and I hope it will increasingly be understood as a sacred text rooted in Jewish tradition but reaching far beyond it to the whole of Humanity — which indeed it celebrates.

This version corrects what is clearly a scribal error in every printed copy of the poem I have seen. The line “More than the calf wants to suck, the cow wants to give suck” shows up in printed versions as “More than the calf wants to suck, the cow wants to give such.” This “such” is a vague and meaningless word — terrible poetry — and the line as printed here echoes a teaching of Talmud that is a metaphor for teachers wanting to teach more than students want to learn. I have urged editors of Rukeyser’s work to correct the error, but so far to no avail.

References in the poem that may be obscure to many readers today: “Nauvoo” was a town in Illinois where the early Mormon community settled until (1844) suffering violence at the hands of mobs and resettling in Salt Lake City. The “Long March” was the trek of the early Chinese Communist Party all across China to build a political base in Yenan province. “The shivering children of Paris” is probably about the creation of a workers’ commune in Paris in 1870, which governed itself by direct socialist democracy until it was brutally destroyed by the invading Prussian army.

Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665), Winter (ca 1660)

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Rosario Castellanos (1925-74)

A Nocturne

Para vivir es demasiado el tiempo;
Para saber no es nada.
A que vinimos, noche, corazon de la
noche?
No es possible sino sonar, morir,
Sonar que no morimos
Y, a veces, un instante, despertar.

Time is too long for life;
For knowledge not enough.
What have we come for, night, heart of night?
Dream that we do not die
And, at times, for a moment, wake
(from the Spanish, English text by Magda Bodin)

Rosario Castellanos, still a young woman

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve chosen Rosario Castellanos for our third poet since I’ve made my website region, From the Women’s Canon: Foremother Poets because I’m strongly drawn to her poetry and I chose lines from one of her poems as the epigraph for its index. She’s particularly fitting for an Austen reverie because she writes as a spinster, and yes she was an important Mexican poetic voices of the 20th century (as Louise Bogan, my first choice since my website was an important mid-20th century American poet).

“Silence Concerning an Ancient Stone”

Here I am, seated, with all my words,
like a basket of green fruit, intact.
The fragments
of a thousand destroyed ancient gods
seek and draw near each other in my blood. They long
to rebuild their statue.
From their shattered mouths
a song strives to rise to my mouth,
a scent of burned resins, some gesture
of mysterious wrought stone.
But I am oblivion, treason,
the shell that did not keep from the sea
even the echo of the smallest wave.
I look not at the submerged temples,
but only at the trees that above the ruins
move their vast shadow, with acid teeth bite
the wind as it passes.
And the seals close under my eyes like
the flower under the searching fingers of a blind man.
But I know: behind
my body another body crouches,
and round about me many breaths
furtively cross
like nocturnal beasts in the jungle.

I know: somewhere,
like the cactus in the desert,
a constellated heart of spines,
it is waiting for a name, as the cactus the rain.

But I know only a few words
in the lapidary language ,
under which they buried my ancestor alive.

(from the Spanish, English text by George D. Schade)

Another: “Untitled

They say that plants don’t talk, nor do
brooks or birds,
nor the wave with its chatter, nor stars
with their shine.
They say it but it’s not true, for whenever
I walk by
they whisper and yell about me

‘There goes the crazy woman dreaming
of life’s endless spring and of fields
and soon, very soon, her hair
will be gray.
She sees the shaking, terrified frost
cover the meadow.’
There are gray hairs in my head; there is frost
on the meadows,
but I go on dreaming—a poor, incurable
sleepwalker
of life’s endless spring that is receding
and the perennial freshness of fields
and souls,
although fields dry and souls burn up.

Don’t gossip about my dreams:
without them how could I admire you? How could
I live?

(from the Spanish Enlish text by Aliki and Willis Barnstone)

This is the famous one:

“Meditation at the Threshold”

No, the solution is not
to jump beneath a train, like Tolstoy’s Anna,
nor to swallow Madame Bovar’s arsenic,
nor to wait on the barren plains of Avila
for the visit of the angel with the javelin
before tying the scarf around one’s head
and beginning to act.

Nor to deduce the laws of geometry by counting
the rafters of the castigation cell,
as Sor Juana did. The solution is not
to write, when visitors come
to the living room of the Austen family,
nor to shut oneself up in the attic
of some house in New England
and dream, with the Dickinson Bible
under a maidenly pillow.

There has to be some other way that isn’t called Sappho,
or Messalina, or Mary of Egypt,
or Magdalene, or Clementina Isaura.

Another way to be human, and free.

Another way to be.
(translated from the Spanish, English text by Kate Flores)

Leonora Carrington (1917, 2011, The House Opposite — there is no more appropriate woman artist

And this, most courageous:

“Daily Round of a Spinster”

To be solitary is shameful. All day long
a terrible blush burnishes her cheek
(while the other is in eclipse).

She busies herself in a labor of ashes,
at tasks worthless and fruitless;
and when her relatives gather
around the fire, telling stories,
the howl is heard
of a woman wailing on a-boundless plain
where every boulder, every scorched tree stump,
every twisted bough is a judge
or a witness without mercy.

At night the spinster
stretches herself out on her bed of agony.
An anguished sweat breaks out to dampen the sheets
and the void is peopled
with made-up dialogues and men.

And the spinster waits, waits, waits.

And she cannot be born in her child, in her womb,
nor can she die
in-her far-off, unexplored body,
a planet the astronomer can calculate,
existent though unseen.

Peering into a dark mirror the spinster
– extinguished star — paints on her lips
with a lipstick the blood she does not have.

And smiles at a dawn without anyone at all.
(translated from the Spanish, English text by Kate Flores)

But she did marry and have a son, Gabriel

“Speaking of Gabriel”

Like all visitors my son disturbed me,
taking a place that was my place,
existing unpropitiously,
making me divide every mouthful in two.

Ugly, sick, bored,
I felt him grow at my expense,
steal his color from my blood, add
a weight and a secret breadth
to my own way of being on the earth.

His body begged me to be born, to cede him the way,
to give him a place in the world,
the quota of time essential for his history.

I consented. And when he came through that wound, through that
hemorrhage of dislodgment,
there departed as well the last I had
of solitude, of gazing out from behind a window.

I was left open, receptive
to visitations, to the wind, to presence.

Many online poems in her original Spanish, from a good full website dedicated to her.

**************************

In her maturity

A short biography: born 1925 in Mexico, she was born a daughter to wealthy people, well-educated and well-connected, but as revolution and reform swept Mexico her family were stripped of much of their land. Within a year of moving to Mexico City, her parents were dead. She did fend for herself. She became a poet, a diplomat (ambassador to Israel from Mexico) and professor, and she published. She grew up originally on a ranch in Chiapas, and her memories, what she saw, became central to her writing as well as her gender. She is said to have been the first woman from there to publish a book. She wrote a weekly column for a newspaper, Excelsior, and joined the National Indigenous Institute, writing scripts for puppet shows that were staged in impoverished regions to promote literacy.

It was upon her parents’s death in 1948, that Castellanos published her first collection of poetry (Trayectoria del polvo), and was able to go to Europe. So she had that essentail trip away, back to Europe, France too, so important to women writers. She is said to have studied Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir while there. Her feminist essays are much influenced by and acknowledge Beauvoir (especially her “Leccion De Cocina” — but a more ironic defiant stance). She was ever shaped by her Spanish ancestry. In 1950 in Mexico, she defended a master’s thesis, “Sobre cultura femenina” (On feminine culture), and perhaps (I would put it) clawed her way to director of cultural programs for the State of Chiapas? Perhaps no one else wanted it.

A brief marriage (1957-1961); one son, Gabriel (1961), then teaching at the National University of Mexico in the 1960s. She wrote one major play, three novels and short fiction too. At least two have been Englished: Balún-Canán(1957), translated as Nine Guardians by Irene Nicholson; The Book of Lamentations (1962), translated by Esther Allen. A famous book is The Eternal Feminine.

She said her letters would serve as her autobiography. Balún Canán and Oficio de tinieblas (translated into English as The Book of Lamentations) is semi-autobiographical and depicts a Tzotzil indigenous uprising in Chiapas based on one that had occurred in the 19th century. Among the Englished novels, Nine Guardians attracted stimulating reviews, e.g., Rodman, Selden. “Children Caught in a Storm.” The New York Times Book Review (5 June 1960): 5.

On these short stories and the longer fiction: See Mary Gomez Parham, “Alienation in Rosario Castellanos’ Ciudad Real [her 2nd collection], Letras Femeninas 15.1-2 (Spring 1989): p22-27. In her final work of fiction, Castellanos turned from the difficulties of racial and class conflict, from provincial to urban Mexican: Mary Gomez Parham, “Moving Toward the Other: New Dimensions in Human Relationships in Rosario Castellanos’ ‘Album de familia,’ Chasqui 17.1 (May 1988): p3-7. Marriage is one of its themes: Geldrich-Leffman, Hanna. “Marriage in the Short Stories of Rosario Castellanos.” Chasqui 21.1 (May 1992): 27-35. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jenny Cromie. Vol. 39. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Castellanos was humorous, witty, too: Nina M. Scott, “Rosario Castellanos: Demythification through Laughter, Humor 2.1 (1989): p19-29.

I chose an appealing photograph of Rosario Castellano when young to begin with: a black-and-white photo of her as a young woman with her hair pulled tight back and plainly into a knot at the nape of her neck; she wear a plain white T-shirt and pinafore or jumper of soft material. She leans on a desk with a book near her; at her back are shelves of books and folders. She has a straight-forward look, slightly dreamy on her face.

A sad sudden death when she was still young: she died in Tel Aviv in 1974 at the age of 49 after accidentally electrocuting herself while doing her hair. It’s been suggested she might have killed herself, but many dispute this and this kind of impulse seems foreign to her writing self. Yet there is an intense ironic melancholy & alienation in her writing (why I like it).

Remedios Varo (1908-63), Harmony (1956) — except it be Remedios Varo

If you’re like me and have a humble working library in English: these three anthologies can start you off with brief selections, a life, and list of books: Carol Cosman’s The Book of Women Poets; Angel and Kate Flores, The Defiant Muse: Hispanic Feminist Poems; Aliki and Willis Barnstone, A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now. Lund Humphries, Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Kati Horna. For her prose and fiction too: A Rosario Castellanos Reader, ed. trans. Maureen Ahern. University of Texas Press, 1988 (400 pages!); Meditation on the Threshold a Bilingual Anthology Poetry by Rosario Castellanos (Jun 1988).

A select bibliography in English from an academic website:

“Rosario Castellanos”. Spanish American Woman Writers: A Bio Bibliographical Source Book. Ed. Diane E. Marting. Westport &London: Greenwood Press, 1990: 140-155; Anderson, Helene M. “Rosario Castellanos and the Structures of Power”. Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America. Ed. Doris Meyer & Margarite Fernández Olmos. NY: Brooklyn College Humanities Institute Series, Brooklyn College, 1983: 22-31; Schaefer, Claudia. Textured Lives: Women, Art, and Representation in Modern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992; Turner, Harriet S. “Moving Selves: The Alchemy of Esmero (Gabriela Mistral, Gloria Riestra, Rosario Castellanos, and Gloria Fuertes)”. In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers. Eds, Noël Valis and Carol Maier. Lewisburg: Bucknell University press, 1990: 227-245.

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)

“A Receit to Cure the Vapours”

Why will Delia thus retire
And languish Life away?
While the sighing Crowds admire
‘Tis too soon for Hartshorn Tea.

All these dismal looks and fretting
Cannot Damon’s life restore,
Long ago the Worms have eat him,
You can never see him more.

Once again consult your Toilet,
In the Glass your Face review,
So much weeping soon will spoil it
And no Spring your Charms renew.

I, like you, was born a Woman
Well I know what Vapours mean,
The Disease alas! is common,
Single we have all the Spleen.

All the Morals that they tell us
Never cur’d Sorrow yet,
Chuse among the pretty Fellows
One of humour, Youth, and Wit.

Prithee hear him ev’ry Morning
At least an hour or two,
Once again at Nights returning,
I be1eive the Dose will do.

Mary Wortley Montagu, attributed to Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723)

Dear friends and readers,

One of the great poets of the 18th century century, (once called Lady) Mary Wortley Montagu has been best known for her letters, be they the whole (partial — much has been lost) collection or just the ones addressed from Constantinople (The Embassy Letters), and her courageous use of inoculation against the small pox on her son and promotion of the procedure. Perhaps her life as a whole in several excellent biographies and literary studies, her relationships with brilliant famous men, periods at court and in Italy, proto-feminist prose, together with her verse, now vie for equal attention. Still while I like most of these, and am stirred, amused, absorbed by her letters, I’d say she was a great poet first of all. Along with Anne Finch and Charlotte Smith, Mary Wortley Montagu is one of the great woman poets of the long 18th century.

And there is too much to chose from, some so complex in the way of 18th century verse, and of differing variety, for one small entry. Short Martial epigrams:

Be plain in Dress and sober in your Diet;
In short my Dearee, kiss me, and be quiet.

Strong satire where she takes an unusual point of view. Most people at the time (and romantics still) seem to sympathize with Mary Queen of Scots, romanticize and glamorize her as a victim: in my view it’s an iconography of compensation and vicarious acting out made acceptable by Mary’s own defeat (she was in life a bad politician). Well Wortley Montagu comes out on the side of Elizabeth I, who actually kept her power, won, never married and remained strong.

An Epilogue to a new play of Mary Queen of Scots [never finished], design’d to be spoke by Mrs Oldfield:

What could Luxurious Woman wish for more
To fix her Joys, or to extend her Power?
Their every Wish was in this Mary seen,
Gay, Witty, Youthful, Beauteous and a Queen!
Vain useless Blessing with ill Conduct joyn’d!
Light as the Air, and Fleeting as the Wind.
What ever Poets write, or Lovers vow;
Beauty, what poor Omnipotence hast thou!
Queen Bess had Wisdom, Councel, Power
How few espous’d a Wretched Beauty’s Cause!
Learn hence, ye Fair, more solid charms to prize …

If you will Love, love like Eliza then,
Love for Amusement like those Traitors, Men.
Think that the Pastimes of a Leisure Hour
She favour’d oft — but never shar’d her Power.

The Traveller by Desart Wolves persu’d,
If by his Art the savage Foe’s subdu’d,
The World will still the noble Act applaud,
Tho’ Victory was gain’d by needfull Fraud.

Such is (my tender Sex) our helpless Case
And such the barbarous Heart, hid by the begging Face.
By Passion fir’d, and not with held by Shame,
They cruel Hunters are, we trembling Game.

Trust me Dear Ladys (for I know ‘em well),
They burn to Triumph, and they sigh — to tell.
Cruel to them that Yeild, Cullys to them that sell.
Beleive me tis by far the wiser Course,
Superior Art should meet superior force.

Hear: but be faithfull to your Interest still,
Secure your Hearts, then Fool with who you will.

Maria Skerrett (later Walpole’s wife), Mary’s friend by Jean-Baptiste van Loo

The same woman wrote (as Byron said), one of the truest descriptions of the experience of mutual adult love. It’s in the form of a balled to Robert Walpole’s mistress, Molly Skerritt, her friend. Montagu’s vision of public posing and stifling behavior in her epistle to Molly Skerritt is placed against her definition of a false and true lover:

At length, by so much importunity press’d,
Take (Molly) at once the inside of my breast.
This stupid indiff’rence so oft you blame,
Is not owing to nature, to fear, or to shame:
I am not as cold as a virgin in lead,
Nor are Sunday’s sermons so strong in my head:
I know but too well how time flies along,
That we live but few years, and yet fewer are young.

But I hate to be cheated, and never will buy
Long years of repentance for moments of joy.
Oh! was there a man (but where shall I find
Good sense and good-nature so equally join’d?)
Would value his pleasure, contribute to mine;
Not meanly would boast, nor lewdly design;
Not over severe, yet not stupidly vain,
For I would have the power, though not give the pain.

No pedant, yet learned; no rake-helly gay,
Or laughing, because he has nothing to say;
To all my whole sex obliging and free,
Yet never be fond of any but me;
In public preserve the decorum that’s just,
And show in his eyes he is true to his trust!
Then rarely approach, and respectfully bow,
But not fulsomely pert, nor yet foppishly low.

But when the long hours of public are past,
And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last,
May every fond pleasure that moment endear;
Be banish’d afar both discretion and fear!
Forgetting or scorning the airs of the crowd,
He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud,
Till lost in the joy, we confess that we live,
And he may be rude, and yet I may forgive.

And that my delight may be solidly fix’d,
Let the friend and the lover be handsomely mix’d;
In whose tender bosom my soul may confide,
Whose kindness can soothe me, whose counsel can guide.
From such a dear lover as I here describe,
No danger should fright me, no millions should bribe;
But till this astonishing creature I know,
As I long have liv’d chaste, I will keep myself so.

I never will share with the wanton coquette,
Or be caught by a vain affectation of wit.
The toasters and songsters may try all their art,
But never shall enter the pass of my heart.
I loathe the lewd rake, the dress’d fopling despise:
Before such pursuers the nice virgin flies;
And as Ovid has sweetly in parable told,
We harden like trees, and like rivers grow cold

She could write exquisitely delicate lyrics, which use the pictorial techniques of emblematic poetry:

Hymn to the Moon

Thou silver deity of secret night,
Direct my footsteps through the woodland shade,
Thou conscious witness of unknown delight,
The Lovers guardian, and the muse’s aid.

By thy pale beams I solitary rove,
To thee my tender grief confide,
Serenely sweet you gild the silent Grove,
My friend, my goddess and my guide.

Even thee fair queen from thy amazing height
The charms of young Endimion drew,
Veil’d with the mantle of concealing night,
With all thy greatness and thy coldness too

And the most remorseless of bitter epitaphs. This pair escaped the hypocrisies and cruelties of the social group — and also time and chance ever after. The sarcasm is aimed at Pope:

Epitaph

Here lyes John Hughs and Sarah Drew.
Perhaps you’ll say, what’s that to you?
Believe me Freind much may be said
On this poor Couple that are dead.
On Sunday next they should have marry’d;
But see how oddly things are carry’d.
On Thursday last it rain’d and Lighten’d,
These tender Lovers sadly frighten’d
Shelter’d beneath the cocking Hay
In Hopes to pass the Storm away.
But the bold Thunder found them out
(Commission’d for that end no Doubt)
And seizing on their trembling Breath
Consign’d them to the Shades of Death.
Who knows if ’twas not kindly done?
For had they seen the next Year’s Sun
A Beaten Wife and Cuckold Swain
Had jointly curs’d the marriage chain.
Now they are happy in their Doom
For P. has wrote upon their Tomb.

She also had a beloved for whom she threw away her English life and never did retrieve it (see the biography below):

Francesco Algarotti, drawn by Jonathan Richardson, 19 August 1736

My favorite for a long time was her elegant Horatian contemplative and melancholy-disillusioned Epistle from Constantinople since it’s long and frequently-reprinted I just offer the URL to Written in January 1718 in the Chiosk at Pera overlooking Constantinople. Wortley Montagu writes as fine a Horatian poem, Georgic and complex a satire as Alexander Pope in her Epistle to Lord Burlington, where she critiques and remembers a philosophical point of view emerging from landscape meditation.

Not on line nor much discussed finally are her contrasting amoral disturbing (to read) poems where Wortley Montagu takes what feels to be a cruel point of view towards a woman. In each case a woman contemporary who had been treated very badly in public after a sex scandal becomes the target of a poem where the poet presents the woman as having “asked” for the sex (in a way that presented the woman’s desire as reprehensible and disgusting, or unsympathetically vulnerable). Montagu will mock the woman in satires where she was said to have played the part, say, of the coachman (or other male servant) who in the scandal sheets was either accused of raping, intruding on the woman’s room, or being invited into it. These have sufficient raw imagery to be startling today. The titles are “Virtue in Danger:” A Lamentable Story how a vertuous Lady had like to have been Ravished by her Sister’s Footman,” “Epistle from Arthur Gray to Mrs Murray,” “On a Lady mistaking a Dyeing Trader for a Dying Lover.”

She wrote too from the point of view of the woman who had been “compromised,” and then found herself ejected or divorced and deprived of income and ostracized, e.g., “Epistle from Mrs Younge to her Husband,” “Miss Cooper to …”. On this last Montagu’s mask is that of a fellow woman diarist, letter-writer and poet, Judith Cowper Madan (1702-81). Madan also destroyed much of her work and was Pope’s muse (for a time). In some courtship letters a jealous Judith Cowper wrote that her suitor and later husband, Captain Martin Madan, neglected her. In Montagu’s poem Miss Cooper is clearly in love with the absent male who is apparently indifferent to her — and openly unfaithful. Montagu makes him unusually ambitious, avaricious, and hypocritically jealous because for advancement he would connive at his own cuckoldry. Here the unfeeling nature of the husband (“Who cannot pity, what you cannot feel”) is opposed to the passionate one of the wife. The result though is not so much desperation as fierce anger.

The strong Disorders on my Vitals prey,
I weep all night, yet Hate the Dawning Day,
The Day restores me to the Cursed Care
To hide a Torment which I cannot bear.

The poet describes the cool ruthless conduct of the husband and then recoils from this in a display of intense unanswered emotion which demands sincerity and emotion and can find none anywhere, which looks for seriousness in others and finds only cant:

Take back, ye Gods, this useless pow’r to please,
It gains no Glory, and it gives no Ease!
While at my Feet neglected Lovers lie
‘Tis I that languish and ’tis I that dye.
With silent sorrow they reproach my Scorn,
With more than equal pangs this Heart is torn,
And when I see you (’tis not to be told)
I see you Careless, Insolent, or Cold,
What ere you say, you say with too much ease,
No fear to lose me, nor no Care to please.
Dull common Courtship comes not from the Heart,
No rapture when we meet, no pain to part.

The art of the poem is in its simultaneous analysis and narration, a concrete story and an emotional tidal wave:

Go Faithless Man, this wretched Victim leave,
I cannot be more lost, or you deceive.
Persue the dirty Paths that lead to Gold
And like a Common Prostitute be sold.
Are these the Steps by which to Power you move?
Is this the picture of the Man I love?

By Heaven, I will this mean Desire controul,
I’ll tear this hated Passion from my Soul,
I will not thus be toss’d — Desire — Despise,
Contemn your Folly, yet adore your Eyes

Corrosive, ruthless, yet facing her passion.

******************************

Thoresby Hall, Nottingham, where she grew up from 1699

Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century Lady Mary Pierrepont Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was known as an eccentric, a risqué earl’s daughter separated from her miser of a husband, both of whom were scourged by Pope. What respect she had was for helping to spread the practice of inoculation for smallpox after she had been its victim — and for her sparklingly witty though lonely letters. These latter were frequently compared to the letters of Madame de Sévigné, another mother whose daughter seemed (at least to those who read the letters) not sufficiently grateful for such an outpouring of love and genius. In 1838 her status as a letter-writer was further reinforced by the publication of a series of letters she wrote when Lady Mary (as she was then known) accompanied her husband as wife of the ambassador to Constantinople: these were eventually published as Letters from the Levant During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716- 1718. She told of walking through the streets of the city swathed in veils, of insinuating herself into harems where she praised the women’s life there. We might call her the Germaine Greer of her day, by the mid-20th century Montagu’s image had changed only insofar as her letters were respected and her reflective passionate intelligence was caught in her poetry.

Montagu seems to have been a restless spirit, daring, unconventional in public, never wanting to retreat from the difficulties or divertissements of life. Montagu dared to leave her husband, threw over place, position, and access to a secure large income to meet in Italy an Italian philosophe, Francesco Algarotti, whom she wanted to live with her as her lover. She ended alone in Italy and then was fleeced by a much younger lover. An emotional need, and isolation from any real friends and loneliness, led her to turn to the cold conformist daughter — and write more remarkable letters. She did remain strongly hostile to her son.

Only recently has Montagu’s poetry been discussed adequately. It used to be treated only in terms of its narrow topic content and social context. It has been hard to see these as feminist until recently too. Although Montagu was learned and spoke eloquently of the disadvantages English women suffered, she always said that women were naturally vulnerable to folly (particularly when without fathers or husbands), and advised learning for women as a cheap way to fill up idle hours. In contrast to Finch, Montagu helped to destroy her writing. She burnt as she wrote. We do not know what her family burnt before the 1803 edition of her works, but we do know that upon her elopement with Edward Wortley Montagu, her sister, Lady Frances Pierrepont (later Mar), hurriedly burnt all the diaries and papers she could find, knowing Montagu would approve. Montagu’s closest relative, her daughter, Mary Wortley Stuart, Lady Butte burnt all her mother’s private papers. And Montagu herself burnt all her letters to Maria Skerrett, Robert Walpole’s mistress, and all those to John Hervey, the latter act mourned thus by Robert Halsbands “they must have been brilliant and revealing of the interests they had in common: politics, literature and love.” Upon that pyre she also placed her history of her own time. She died in a comedy of cross-purposes over those of her letters that she did want to survive. In Halsband’s ironic words, “She expressed great anxiety that the two volumes of [the Turkish Embassy] letters she had given to the clergyman in Holland should be published. Her family were in terror lest they should be.”

So it becomes very hard to assess her, to know what is a signature poem, but I’ll end here on one I’ve read over and over to myself over the years. It was written by her very late in life:

Exil’d, grown old, in Poverty and Pain;
Philosophy could calm the Poet’s breast:
But oh! what cure for those who wish in Vain!
What Lesson is it must restore my Rest?
Let others court the mighty Idol Fame;
Let all the World forget Clarinda’s Name,
I could lose all that Avarice requires
OF all that Beauty that the World admires,
This only greife I cannot bear or cure,
The firmness of my Soul gives way,
Some pitying Power behold what I endure

I’ve written several papers on her. The longest (and best) shows how like she is to Anne Finch: Anne Finch and Mary Wortley Montagu, Sister Poets. Another justifies and revels in their anger, depressions, and morbidity: “I hate such parts as we have plaid today.” IF you can reach my Library Thing, you will find my library of books on Mary Wortley Montagu

Frances Pierrepont Montagu Erksine, countess of Mar, Mary’s sister, by Godrey Kneller (probably in 1715)

Some advice: begin and end with Isobel Grundy. Grundy’s biography contextualizes Wortley Montagu much more adequately: for example,
in her family, and among her women friends. She tells far more than Halsband about the marriage to Wortley and shows how Lady Mary tried hard and how Wortley really did abuse her emotionally. There’s much more about the years in Italy too. I also like an old book: Symonds, Emily Morse (pseudonym George Paston) [as opposed to Gibbs's old book still findable on the Net and misogynistic], Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Her Times. London: Methuen, 1907. A newer good one attempts to explain away or justify the anti-feminist hostility (cruelty) of Lady Mary’s verses which further scapegoated women already made targets for nastiness: Cynthia Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth Century Familiar Letter (Athens: Georgia UP, 1994), 114-52. For the response of one of the women Montagu wrote about see Robert Halsband, “Virtue in Danger: The Case of Griselda Murray,” History Today, 17 (1967): 693-700.

I find the years in Italy are not written about adequately (truthfully enough) at all, especially the long period where she basically lived with this younger Italian crook-type. Grundy really has a good one on this, trying to explain why Wortley Montagu had to lie and cover up what had happened: “Isobel Grundy, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Italian Memoir,’” The Age of Johnson, 6 (1994): 322-24, 339- 43. On the way she goes into the real problems women confront when they want to write truthfully about their lives.

As to editions, I recommend Grundy’s Essays and Poems and Simplicity a Comedy (Oxford UP, 1977), the complete letters but if you cannot find or have time for them, then Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Selected Letters, ed. introd. Isobel Grundy [again] (Penguin, 1997). For fun and information and insightful and delightful pictures, Dervla Murphy, introd. Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. compiled by Christopher Pick (New Amsterdam book, 1988) Companion volumes: Robert Halsband’s Lord Hervey, Eighteenth Century Courtier and Peter Quennell’s Alexander Pope: The Education of Genius, 1688-1728 (New York: Stein and Day, 1968).

Mary Wortley Montagu by Jonathan Richardson, ca. 1726 — the best known authenticated picture

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

Louise Bogan

Dear friends and readers,

This is the first foremother poet blog I’ve written since putting up my new From the Women’s Canon: Foremother Poets on my website. I chose her as first because when reading through anthologies I’ve been caught by one of her poems again and again. This is my favorite, the kind of poem one reads and thereafter doesn’t forget having read, even if details face:

“Evening in the Sanitarium”

The free evening fades, outside the windows fastened with
       decorative iron grilles.
The lamps are lighted; the shades are drawn; the nurses are watching
       a little.
It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bones of needles;       &nbspof the games of anagrams and bridge;
The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask.

The period of the wildest weeping, the fiercest delusion, is over.
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost
       well.

Some of them will stay almost well always; the blunt-faced woman
       whose thinking dissolved
Under academic discipline; the manic-depressive girl
Now levelling off one paranoiac afflicted with jealousy.
Another with persecution. Some alleviation has been possible.

O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after
       childbirth!
O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted!
To the surburban railway station you will return, return,
To meet forever Jim home on the on the 5:35.
You will be again as normal and selfish and heartless as anybody
       else.

There is life left: the piano says it with its octave smile.
The soft carpets pad the thump and splinter of the suicide to be.
Everything will be splendid: the grandmother will not drink
       habitually.
The fruit salad will bloom on the plate like a bouquet
And the garden produce the blue-ribbon aquilegia.
The cat will be glad; the fathers feel justified; the mothers
       relieved.
The sons and husbands will no longer need to pay the bills.
Childhood will be put away, the obscene nightmare abated.

At the ends of corridors the baths are running.
Mrs C. again feels the shadow of the obsessive idea.
Miss R. looks at the mantel-piece, which must mean something
(1941)

(This puts me in mind of Susan Hill’s A Change for the Better where an older woman leaves, escapes is the more accurate word, her daughter’s house and moves to a home for the retired, and finds a better life. Or Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palefrey at the Claremont where a much much older woman develops a loving friendship with a young man.)

The essayist at the Poetry Foundation distinguishes Louise Bogan as “the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century,” and heaps honorific words and phrases on her (“restrained, subtle, intellectual style,” about “private experience, but is not private,” “precise” and complex” (!), and of course not susceptible to alignment with feminists (by whom she has been “unfairly castigated”, “meticulously distilled”)a and writes about “betrayal, especially sexual betrayal.” She is terse, writes rhymed, accentual poetry, uses stanzas, and her poems tend to be short. See Glora Bowles, Louise Bogan’s Aesthetic of Limitation [Indiana University Press, 1987]).. I like all this and how her poetry has inward stance, is often profoundly melancholy. I love its stillness (that’s why the often-reprinted “Medusa”), its subjects which seem to be very much that of a woman (though they are often unspecific in origin). In many the implied speaker is an older women, more vulnerable, uglier (or so the world and men judge her), but at the same time or thus freer, having given over wanting what one cannot have

“Henceforth, From the Mind”

Henceforth, from the mind,
For your whole joy, must spring
Such joy as you may find
In any earthly thing,
And every time and place
Will take your thought for grace.

Henceforth, from the tongue,
From shallow speech alone,
Comes joy you thought, when young,
Would wring you to the bone,
Would pierce you to the heart
And spoil its stop and start.

Henceforward, from the shell,
Wherein you heard, and wondered
At oceans like a bell
So far from ocean sundered –
A smothered sound that sleeps
Long lost within lost deeps,

Will chime you change and hours,
The shadow of increase,
Will sound you flowers
Born under troubled peace-
Henceforth, henceforth
Will echo sea and earth.

I like the love poems which use vast and classical imagery, which are drenched with sudden hope and insight out of grief and loss:

“Song for the Last Act”

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I look.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music’s cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
o not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

“Zone”

We have struck the regions wherein we are keel or reef.
The wind breaks over us,
And against high sharp angles almost splits into words,
And these are of fear or grief.

Like a ship, we have struck expected latitudes
Of the universe, in March.
Through one short segment’s arch
Of the zodiac’s round
We pass,
Thinking: Now we hear
What we heard last year,
And bear the wind’s rude touch
And its ugly sound
Equally with so much
We have learned how to bear.

“The Crows”

The woman who has grown old
And knows desire must die,
Yet turns to love again,
Hears the crows’ cry.

She is a stem long hardened,
A weed that no scythe mows.
The heart’s laughter will be to her
The crying of the crows,

Who slide in the air with the same voice
Over what yields not, and what yields,
Alike in spring, and when there is only bitter
Winter-burning in the fields.

She is also likened to the metaphysical poets, to Walter Pater (and his love of aestheticism), but it seems to me she eschews being outstanding, nothing forced, all plain common words. She’ll call a poem, “Second Song,” and begin “I said out of sleeping,” and yet is unlike Emily Dickinson, doesn’t shock or startle you frontally (“Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed”), and she can be irritated, as in another often-reprinted “Women:” “Women have no wildernesses in them/They are provident instead.” Not everyone can take a chance, be wild, wander about daringly as she did.

I prefer the poems where she drops all classical masks and uses the imagery of such poetry to visualize her state. Her sister here is her other uncontrollable self:

“The Sleeping Fury”

Your hair fallen on your cheek, no longer in the sem-
      blance of serpents,
Lifted in the gale; your mouth, that shrieked so, silent.
You, my scourge, my sister, lie asleep, like a child,
Who, after rage, for an hour quiet, sleeps out its tears.

      And now I may look upon you,
Having once met your eyes. You lie in sleep and forget
   me.
Alone and strong in my peace, I look upon you in yours.

No sentimental returns to childhood for her when she grew older: from “Kept:” “The trumpery dolls, the toys/Now to be put away:/We are not girls and boys.

And I get a certain wry exhilaration from her address to her glass of wine, enemy and long-time friend:

… Take from the mind its loss …
Return to the vein
All that is worth
Grief. Give that beat again.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1825), Wineglasses (1875)

****************************

Louise Bogan (late in life)

Despite growing up the daughter of a white collar mill-worker (her father) whose mother is described as “unstable” (very bad, and yet worse, adulterous), one of three children where the middle child died, moving about she had an excellent education: a New Hampshire convent (1906-1908) and at Boston’s excellent Girls’ Latin School (1910-1915), where she received a classical education in Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, history, science, and the arts. How I know not. She even went to Boston University, and then by earning a scholarship to Radcliffe. Another bad mistake was escape through an early marriage to a German soldier, which landed her in Panama, with a daughter; another flight to her parents ended in reconciliation with the husband and army base life. By 1919 though she left her daughter with her parents, and went to NY, a year later upon her husband’s death gaining a widow’s pension. Somehow she then went from a job at Brentano’s bookstore (there weren’t so many of these good bookstores then) to being a member of the NY literary community, people who counted (good poets and writers too), friend of Edmund Wilson.

1925 another husband (Raymond Holden, from a wealthy family, a sometime poet and novelist who had been a friend of Robert Frost), she retrieves her daughter and is living the life of a woman of letters. A Guggenheim in 1932 (and trip to Europe, Italy, France, and Austria, struggling to write and often depressed, the marriage falling apart completely), she returned to NY to put herself into a hospital (again they were different then) with a severe nervous breakdown. Out (7 months), divorcing, making it with some good friends, she became a staff writer and wrote stories for the New Yorker. Money troubles came (she was once evicted) but the 1930s and 40s were good years for her; they included a love affair with a younger poet, Theodore Roethke. Out of Italy and this relationship came the magnificent:

Roman Fountain

Up from the bronze I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the iamge whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain’s bowl
Alive the air of summer

Sargent, A Roman Fountain in a Medici Villa

Another good relationship much later was with a much-less admired man, an electrician from the Bronx who helped her during a depression (they met on a boat to Southampton); she hid this lover from her friends so the sources I’ve read don’t cite his name. Her last apartment was on West 169th and from there she lived her later hard-working sometimes depressed years as critic, essayist and poet. She was alcoholic in these later years. She died in her apartment of a coronary occlusion February 4, 1970.

I hope to read her autobiography this coming year (or soon at any rate): Journey Around My Room, edited by Ruth Limmer. Her original works include: Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (Chicago: Regnery, 1951); Collected Poems, 1923-1953 (New York: Noonday Press, 1954); Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry (New York: Noonday Press, 1955); The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968); A Poet’s Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation, edited by Robert Phelps and Ruth Limmer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).

It fascinates me that she translated Goethe’s dark bitter Elective Affinities: I realize I’ve read his Sorrows of Werther in her translation (both with Elizabeth Mayer). She wrote on Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf. Ruth Limmer (who seems to have been her close friend) edited her letters: What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters, 1920-1970. Elizabeth Frank’s is the biography cited: Louise Bogan: A Portrait (New York: Knopf, 1985). Jaqueline Ridgeway did the sensible Twayen. Jane Couchman produced a book of primary materials by Bogan for research; Martha Collins an anthology of critical essays. Poets Bogan’s studied with: Elizabeth C. Dodd, The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück; Mary DeShazer, “My Scourge, My Sister: Louise Bogan’s Muse,” in Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, edited by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), pp. 92-104.

Margaret Foreman (b. 1951), Mrs Mabel Whitehead (cover illustration for Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palefrey at the Claremont)

Ellen

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From the Woman’s Canon

Paula Rego, Germaine Greer (1995)

Dear friends and readers,

At long last I have made a new section on my website. It will be a kind of online anthology of women poets, beginning in classical or the earliest recorded time we have and continuing to today. I call it “From The Woman’s Canon,” for it can represent only a small part of a canon that itself doesn’t properly exist. Paula Backscheider (whose Eighteenth Century Women Poets and their Poetry I reviewed) is just one of many women scholars who have demonstrated that a large and varied women’s canon would exist but that much of it has been destroyed and what was left censored, with its original perspectives changed, often reversed. I probably first became aware of this when a couple of years after finishing graduate school (1982) I discovered that there had been quite a number of Renaissance women poets, and a number of these had large oeuvres of poetry. No one had said anything about such a group when I was in graduate school, and for a time I majored in the Renaissance.

by 1984 I had begun to go once, twice, perhaps three times a week to the Library of Congress to do research on Anne Finch whose poetry I had fallen in love with while doing my dissertation on Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Grandison. During that time I had learned there were many women novelists who were good and had written fine novels; but their works were no longer available and what one could learn of their lives was the result of very recent compilations, surveys, books like Mothers of the Novel by Dale Spender. Now I began to discover more women poets, 17th through 18th century and many poetry that I loved and thought superb. They often took a woman’s view of the world. Among the critics I read then to whom I was grateful for her work was Germain Greer (whose picture you see heading this blog).

Well that was 30 years ago, and I’ve gone on to read many feminist (and not so feminist) histories of women’s literature, and seen an explosion in publication of women’s writing. I have myself now translated the complete poetry of two Renaissance women (Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara), done original researching on the still unpublished writing of a great 18th century poet, Anne Finch, and written for conventional publication as well as here online about many women writers.

I find especial solace and strength and write about women’s life-writing, novels, films, but poetry remains my special love. and sometime during 2005 I began to write short lives of women poets to which I attached what I thought were their best or most characteristic poems and evaluative commentary. I would also offer a list of essays or books by or essays on these poets, or anthologies which included them. I put these on my first blog, Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Too (see remnant of part of blog devoted to Jane Austen).

It was probably around 2005 I joined Wom-po, a listserv community devoted to talking about and sharing women’s poetry, and there I met the listowner, Annie Finch, poet and translator who had declared Wednesday to be a day for us all to share poems by women. She was committed to recovering a woman poets poetic tradition, to the reality that women “think back through our mothers” as writers, readers, artists.S She had declared Wednesday to be a day for us all to share poems by women. After I began to post, she declared Friday to be a day for posting poems about and lives of “foremother poets.” The custom continued for some months, but after that most of the people only contributed now and again. I was one of the people who contributed consistently and by the time of the First Annual Festival of Women’s Poetry (online), had with thirty lives and poetry ready to be put on the site.

Since then I’ve written more of these little lives, posting them to Wom-po and also the listservs I moderate (at Yahoo: Eighteenth Century Worlds, Women Writers through the Ages, Trollope19thCStudies), and when I opened my new blogs I began on Fridays to write them regularly (Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two, and Reveries Under the Sign of Austen). Now, in order to make these visible to others, to have one single handy place to reach them, and to fill in unnoticed gaps, I have decided to gather all I’ve done on my website onto this one place.

Foremother Poets: From the Women’s Canon

As you will see, I tell a version of the above little history, define “foremother” and have arranged the poets chronologically. To facilitate finding individuals I also provide

An Alphabetical Index

Stevie Smith (one of my favorite mid-20th century poets)

While my selection must reflect my own knowledge and tastes, I have a wider goal because I have gained so much in my life of meaning, strength, pleasure from women’s writing, and so have made a third section which I mean to add it. It is a list of

Anthologies, Handbooks, Histories & Essays, Blogs & Periodicals.

I had early on when I first made my website (1995-96), put together a bibliography of women’s literature. This was simply intended to help other researchers do research on any and all women writers; its origin in my studies of Renaissance literature is reflected in the choices, but it is wide-ranging and attempts to supplement all sorts of causes. This new site is narrower and perhaps shows my experience over the past 15 years of life on the Net, socializing with writers, readers, editors, publishers, and may useful for those coming to it beyond any needs for research or specific knowledge.

In Annie Finch’s “How to create a Poetic Tradition,” Finch demonstrates how central to visibility and thus a perceptible, findable, and usable context for writers and readers is “the entire literary apparatus of reviews, anthologies, journals, histories, panels, conferences, encyclopedias and textbooks.” Anthologies which are 90% male and where the choice of poem is often an unacknowledged masculinist bias (presented as universal or general) cripple the woman writer. Anthologies, handbooks, histories of literature come out of people’s desires, respect, point of view, what they think others will value. So the context is the manifestation of living people and people in the past reading, writing, talking, acting together: “numerous small acts of persistence … To edit, write, and create this apparatus is creative and fulfilling work in itself and tends to enrich a poet’s poetry.” I hope also to enrich other women’s lives as readers, as people, to be able to find a book or text that really speaks home to her.

The site is intended to help reading girls and now women especially not feel alone in their particular sensibility.

Cardplayers: Francis Coates Jones (1757-1932), called The Perplexed Player

If you want to find the books that Germaine Greer wrote as a feminist and specific research on feminism or any women writer, go to the bibliography; if you want to reach a picture of the woman’s poetry canon join in this is yet another place on my site where you will find women thought to be unusual because they were writers but whose lives were like your own in many ways gathered together.

****************

Paula Modersohn-Becker (“To sleep among my paintings is beautiful”)

I hope to keep adding to this website. I have written “lives and work” blogs for a few women artists and many more postings about many women artists for Women Writers Through the Ages, and mean eventually to include these on my site as blogs or linked in from the Yahoo site

My speciality has for the last 15 years been the 18th century, and I read French fluently and Italian pretty well, but would be happy to add material for other languages and women poets beyond my three. I realize how weak my site is in German anthologies, to say nothing of non-European texts.

If anyone knows of an anthology of women’s poetry you think ought to be included, please to let me know. The sole criteria is that it should be an anthology, history, handbook devoted to women poets. I know I have already broken this “rule” (consistency is a bugbear &c), but in the couple of cases where I did there were so many women poets in the supposed general anthology and the selection seemed so good or important I cited it; also I have a few general histories of women’s literature because they include many women poets or are historically important.

I have written about girls’ books and hope to make include this special and important subset of women, of whom I once was one. (See also Deborah O’Keefe, Good Girl Messages and Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading) I have two (biological) daughters of my own.

Vanessa Bell (1878-1961), “Her granddaughters [Amaryllis and Henrietta] reading” (with their dolls nearby)

Ellen

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