Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895

Genre, Gender and Criticism

Marianne Van Remoortel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317104018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In a series of representative case studies, Marianne Van Remoortel traces the development of the sonnet during intense moments of change and stability, continuity and conflict, from the early Romantic period to the end of the nineteenth century. Paying particular attention to the role of the popular press, which served as a venue of innovation and as a site of recruitment for aspiring authors, Van Remoortel redefines the scope of the genre, including the ways in which its development is intricately related to issues of gender. Among her subjects are the Della Cruscans and their primary critic William Gifford, the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his circle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, George Meredith's Modern Love, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's House of Life and Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter. As women became a force to be reckoned with among the reading public and the writing community, the term 'sonnet' often operated as a satirical label that was not restricted to poetry adhering to the strict formalities of the genre. Van Remoortel's study, in its attentiveness to the sonnet's feminization during the late eighteenth century, offers important insights into the ways in which changing attitudes about gender and genre shaped critics' interpretations of the reception histories of nineteenth-century sonnet sequences.

Chapter 1
Invaluable Commodities: Sonnets in the World

When on 14 July 1789 an infuriated mob of civilians stormed the French Bastille, readers of the World could count on being served condensed reports of it at breakfast. Ever since cracks had started to appear in the towering façades of Versailles, the English newspaper had been keeping daily track of the escalating turmoil. Likewise, when a mysterious illness prevented Britain’s own sovereign from performing his royal duties, the public was conscientiously kept abreast with quotidian updates from his physicians that gradually evolved from distressing notes on his declining appetite, insomnia and high fevers to a monotonous succession of bulletins reassuring the public that ‘His Majesty has had a quiet night, and continues in all other respects as he was yesterday’ (11 December 1788).1 A nine days’ wonder in the ever-changing landscape of late eighteenth-century journalism and periodical publishing, the London World offered its readers on four four-column full-sheet pages, in addition, theatrical reviews, concert and book announcements, gossip, parliamentary proceedings, sporting intelligence, foreign intelligence, news from the colonies, shipping forecasts, reports from the Old Bailey, livestock prices, sales by auction, letters to the editor and listings of births, marriages and deaths, all interspersed with random advertisements for boarding schools, rum-shrub, pills, powders and perfumery, diamonds and watches, sporting dogs, hackneys and chaises, houses, inns and rooms for rent, vacancies for domestic servants and notices to creditors.2

With growing public acclaim, the newspaper also reserved the columns of its third page for the poetic effusions of its readership. By 1789, two years after the first copy of the World, Fashionable Advertiser had rolled off John Bell’s famous printing presses in the Strand, no less than 30 contributors regularly submitted their work, among them the eccentric band of pseudonymous poets that would go down in literary history as the ‘Della Cruscans’. Contrary to what recent conceptualizations of the ‘Della Cruscan sonnet’ – a persistent myth that the second chapter of this book will attenuate – may lead us to believe, the sonnet was by no means the one favourite genre of the World and the Della Cruscans. Out of 250 poems published in the newspaper in 1787, for instance, there were only 19 sonnets in addition to a colourful assemblage of odes, verses, epitaphs, elegies, songs, epigrams, stanzas, fables, serenades, epistles, eclogues, extempores, ballads and charades. For the men and women of the World, the sonnet was at once a unique mouthpiece for their overweening ambition and one of many brief verse forms suitable for the volatility and spatial restrictions of newspaper publication.

As my close readings of a number of sample sonnets published in the World will illustrate, it is precisely this cavalier attitude towards the genre, at a time when women poets were claiming the sonnet to legitimize their nascent authorship, and journals with a more exclusive, masculinist literary focus such as the Gentleman’s Magazine were putting a high premium on their demand for exceptional craftsmanship, that makes the sonnets of the World such fascinating subjects of inquiry.

The ‘Sonnet-claim’ and the Periodical Press

After years of dormancy, during which few sonnets were written and still fewer appeared in print, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed an unseen explosion in sonnet writing. Critics today are only beginning to chart the enormous number of poems released into the world as ‘sonnets’. The production started gingerly at first, with a few dozen scattered across the mid-century oeuvres of Philip and Charles Yorke, Thomas Gray, Benjamin Stillingfleet, Thomas Edwards, William Mason, Susannah Highmore, John Duncombe, Hester Chapone, Thomas Warton and Elizabeth Carter, many of which would remain unpublished for decades to come, but increased exponentially as the century advanced. Between 1780 and 1800, the mania assumed such vast proportions, flooding poetry collections, anthologies, literary periodicals and newspaper poetry sections with over 2,500 sonnets, that the Critical Review in 1794 sighed ‘to say the truth, we begin to be almost satiated with sonnets’ (‘Sonnets’ 114). Among the most conspicuous contributors to the revival were William Lisle Bowles, John Bampfylde, William Hayley, Thomas Russell, Samuel Egerton Brydges, John Thelwall and more women than had ever before seen their manuscripts set up in type: Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Julia Young and Ann Yearsley, to name only a few.

Over the last decades, literary criticism has missed few opportunities to quote from Seward’s laudatory sonnet ‘To Mr. Henry Cary’ when documenting the rebirth of the sonnet. Although the poem was composed in honour of a specific occasion – the publication of Cary’s 1788 Sonnets and Odes – it has become iconic of the spectacular revival of the genre.

Prais’d be the Poet, who the Sonnet-claim,

Severest of the Orders, that belong

Distinct and separate to the Delphic Song,

Shall reverence; nor it’s [sic] appropriate name

Lawless assume. Peculiar is it’s [sic] frame –

From him deriv’d who shunn’d the City-Throng,

And warbled sweet, thy Rocks and Streams among,

Lonely Valclusa! – and ‘that Heir of Fame,’

Our greater Milton, hath by many a lay,

Wov’n on this arduous model, clearly shown,

That English Verse may happily display

Those strict energic measures, that alone

Deserve the name of Sonnet, and convey

A grandeur, grace, and spirit, all their own. (Seward, in Cary 5)

Seward praises ‘the Poet’ who, after the example of Petrarch and Milton, venerates ‘the Sonnet-claim,/Severest of the Orders, that belong,/Distinct and separate to the Delphic Song’, but recent scholars have taken it to embrace more than a revindication of the Petrarchan sonnet’s supremacy. More specifically, it has come to emblemize the key role played by women poets in boosting the popularity of the genre to unprecedented heights. Writing and publishing (legitimate) sonnets was ‘a self-conscious and competitive project’ for Seward and her female colleagues, Paula Backscheider comments, in which the ‘honor of their sex was at stake’ (343). ‘The “sonnet’s claim” [became] an opportunity to exploit a long-lasting tradition in order to gain respectability and success’, Silvia Bordoni argues (‘Sonnet’s Claim’ 85). In the introduction to their anthology A Century of Sonnets, Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson similarly translate the ‘Sonnet-claim’ as women poets’ ‘attempt at self-canonization’ (10). More than the pubescent novel, they explain, the sonnet with its impressive genealogy offered aspiring authors a means to gain literary recognition and acceptance. The last decades of the eighteenth century thus became ‘the first period of literary history in which women poets showed that they could match skills with male poets in an arena earlier closed to them’ (Feldman and Robinson 10).

Of all female poets publishing sonnets in the last decades of the eighteenth century, Seward herself was probably the one who ventured out most frankly onto masculine terrain to prove that she could ‘match skills’ with her male colleagues. Best known today for her troubled acquaintance with fellow Lichfieldian Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell, and for her expressions of undisguised contempt for Charlotte Smith’s popular and ever-expanding Elegiac Sonnets, those ‘everla[s]ting duns on pity’ (Letters 6:43), Seward published a collection of Original Sonnets on Various Subjects; and Odes Paraphrased from Horace in 1799. Not knowing any Latin, she chose to follow Horace’s originals only loosely – ‘to translate … like a Poet, rather than a versifier’ (105) – but the sonnets are, with few exceptions, rigorous executions of the Italian model popularized by Petrarch and more recently resuscitated by Milton. In addition, Seward regularly exchanged laudatory sonnets with Cary, Joseph Weston, William Hayley, Thomas Lister and William Newton in the poetry section of the prestigious Gentleman’s Magazine. Together, these poets played a significant role in the journal’s own mini-revival of the genre, boosting the production from less than ten published sonnets per year between 1777 and 1784 to 31 in 1788, and 59 in 1789.3 Their ostentatious reciprocation of flattery tempted a reader of the World to imagine the following ‘Dialogue in Verse’ between Seward and Hayley:

SHE – ‘Tuneful poet! Britain’s glory!

‘Mr. HAYLEY – that is you.’

HE – ‘Ma’am, you carry all before you!

‘Trust me, LICHFIELD’S SWAN, you do!’

SHE – ‘Ode, Didactic, Epic, Sonnet!

‘Mr. HAYLEY, you’re divine.’

HE – ‘Ma’am, I’ll take my oath upon it,

‘You alone are all the Nine.’ (5 February 1790)

The sonnet’s solid claim for poetic mastery has been amply demonstrated in the case of Seward and her closest colleagues. As early as 1799, in a commendatory sonnet heading Seward’s Original Sonnets, Thomas Park praised her ‘strains …/Which may to arduous skill its meed assign,/… And proudly triumph, with a generous strife,/O’er all the “flat realities of life”’ (n. pag.). More recently, Backscheider has noted that Seward ‘invoked the authority of the Gentleman’s Magazine’ when defending her adoption of the legitimate sonnet and ‘piled up discrediting phrases for other kinds of sonnets in the preface to her Original Sonnets’ (340).4 In The Poetics of Sensibility, Jerome McGann has argued that Mary Robinson, by ‘choos[ing] Milton to authorize her resort to the Italian sonnet … establishes the importance of “major form”, a poetic vehicle capable of dealing with matters that transcend the merely personal’ (105). It has generally escaped present-day critics’ attention, however, that the form was, at the same time, claimed by various other groups of poets for very different purposes. The female antipode of the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Lady’s Magazine, first appeared in 1770 as ‘Entertaining Companion to the Fair Sex’. Its section of ‘Poetical Essays’ aimed at providing amusement and diversion rather than serious instruction, containing, among other brief forms, impromptus, enigmas, acrostics, charades, rebuses, short elegies and sonnets. The number of sonnets published in the Lady’s Magazine also peaked in 1789, but the range of subjects is significantly different. The 1789 issues contain amatory sonnets, elegiac sonnets, a ‘Pastoral Sonnet’ by ‘Strephon’, a sonnet ‘To Summer’, a sonnet to a tear and a sonnet ‘To Content’. Most of the poems were written by male poets, who generally submitted their sentimental verse to women’s magazines – Wordsworth’s first published sonnet ‘On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep At A Tale of Distress’ in the European Magazine for March 1787 is a notable exception – while reserving loftier productions for the Gentleman’s Magazine. And then there was the World, the gossip-mongering, trend-setting newspaper that unashamedly judged and published poetry with the authority of a literary journal. Unlike the well-established, avowedly masculine Gentleman’s Magazine and its more recent feminine equivalents, the World did not openly exclude half of the population from its reading public, neither did it flaunt the elitism of the Magazines. It boasted an incredibly diverse set of contributors, men and women, whose verses sought to entertain all smart sections of society. During its short reign, the World extended the responsibilities of the daily press from being a mere ‘mirror of fashion’ to acting as a genuine ‘arbiter of taste’ (Werkmeister 218). ‘For a period of over two years’, with a sphere of influence that far surpassed its sales figures, the newspaper ‘was the sole judge of what was good in the fields of manners and the arts’ (Werkmeister 218). At the same time, the World unceremoniously subjected the lofty sonnet to the economic imperatives and material singularities of newspaper publication. Surrounding it on all four sides with daily gossip, advertisements and other ephemeralities, Bell’s newspaper thus effectively blurred the boundaries between high art and the ‘flat realities of life’ so despised by Seward and her poetic circle.

A Brittle Plea: Bell’s Sonnet ‘To the Countess of S—y’

While the Gentleman’s Magazine was answering the sonnet’s call for genius and exceptional workmanship, the World laid its own claim to the genre, capitalizing its historical bid for eternity to ensure the future of the newspaper and its allied poets. The first sonnet ever to grace the pages of the World was published on 11 January 1787, a mere 11 days into the newspaper’s existence. Ostentatiously captioned ‘SONNET’, it is dedicated ‘To the Countess of S—y’ and signed ‘J.B.’. Its 14 Petrarchan lines fuse stilted rhetoric and bad spelling, grand gesture and poor typography, rampant ambition and material fragility into a gaudy mixture unprecedented in the long life of the sonnet.

WHILE high descents, nor less exalted worth,

A mein that might adorn the royal sphere,

Can call from shades seraphic Virtue forth,

Still, Lady, shalt those shine unspotted clear!

Thou knowest what in happier ages were,

The recompences of immortal bards!

Ere Meaness yet had left his mansion drear,

And stain’d thrir courts that sacred Honour guards!

Tho’ now full many a Lording vain discards

That Muse, exalted by whose living lays,

Their ancettors would sacred leisure spend, –

Fame and approving time their high rewards;

Lady, it will not be thy meanest praise,

Hereafter, to be calle, THE POET’S FRIEND!

Addressing a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Invaluable Commodities: Sonnets in the World
• 2 The Secret Life of the Della Cruscan Sonnet: Gifford’s Baviad and Maeviad
• 3 The Sonnet Parodies of Coleridge and his Circle
• 4 Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and Women’s Sonnets of the 1800s–1840s
• 5 The Inconstancy of Genre: Meredith’s Modern Love
• 6 Metaphor and Maternity: Rossetti’s House of Life and Webster’s Mother and Daughter
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index