Coda. Letitia Landon and the Deathly Pose

Abstract So what if Letitia Landon had three illegitimate children by William Jerdan? What difference does the discovery of the affair make for our reading of L. E. L.’s poetry? This essay begins to explore these questions with regard to her love poems, many of which culminate in a desire for death even greater than that voiced for the absent beloved. We have been disinclined to believe in the authenticity of the poems’ fatal passions and naturally require more evidence before we can assume that any of their intensity is related to Landon’s feelings for the bibulous Literary Gazette editor. Through examining a number of Landon’s early, sexually daring poems and her relationship with Jerdan at the time of their writing, this essay provides some of that evidence and discusses the part these works likely played in the evolution of this literary and sexual relationship. According to Landon’s theory, genius had to devote its grand soul to an inferior being to experience the torment essential for producing literary works of the highest order. Landon viewed her affair with the editor as a means to a greater end: the poems themselves, including, not incidentally, their publication and promotion.

Download Full-text

‘A FONDNESS FOR BEING SAD’: SOME PORTUGUESE SOURCES FOR ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S POETICS OF MELANCHOLY IN SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE (1850)

Diacrítica ◽

10.21814/diacritica.230 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 31 (2) ◽

pp. 23

Author(s):

Paula Guimarães

Keyword(s):

Comparative Analysis ◽

Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽

Great Similarity ◽

Felicia Hemans ◽

Depressed Woman ◽

Poetic Tradition ◽

Luis De Camoes ◽

Letitia Landon ◽

Sonnets From The Portuguese

In seeing melancholy as the antithesis of poetic creativity, the Victorians often broke with the traditional Renaissance and Romantic attitudes of equating melancholy moods with artistic or poetic genius. This article proposes to explore how, initially viewed as an emotional and ‘depressed’ woman poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to resist and escape the sickening disempowerment or abandonment which had affected poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, and engage in a new poetics of melancholy in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). It demonstrates how the poet plays this poetics out in most of her later sonnets, where she indeed attempts to prove that good poetry can be written without melancholy, even if she herself does not always succeed in this deliberate rejection of ‘dejection’. The article thus intends to suggest, through a brief comparative analysis, that her apparently contradictory poetics of melancholy very probably derived from a specifically Portuguese poetic tradition, namely the ‘fondness for being sad’ of Luís de Camões, as well as the sorrowful love of Mariana Alcoforado’s epistles (1669) and of Soror Maria do Céu’s mannerist poems, an influence that is supported in the great similarity of motives and language that can be found in the respective texts.

Download Full-text

The Moor's Last Sight : Spanish-Moorish exoticism and the gender of history in British Romantic poetry

Journal of English Studies ◽

10.18172/jes.77 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

pp. 193

Author(s):

Diego Saglia

Keyword(s):

Lord Byron ◽

Washington Irving ◽

Felicia Hemans ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

Romantic Period ◽

Romantic Poetry ◽

Letitia Landon ◽

New States ◽

Joanna Baillie ◽

Poetic Texts

Legends and tales of Islamic Granada were among the most frequently re-elaborated exotic subjects in British Romantic literature. A popular theme in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Spanish Orientalism attracted both famous writers such as Lord Byron, Joanna Baillie, Washington Irving, Felicia Hemans or Letitia Landon, and less familiar ones such as Lord Porchester, George Moir and Lady Dacre. This essay concentrates on one component of the myth of Granada which enjoyed great diffusion in Romantic-period literature, the tale of the Moor's Last Sigh and the tears shed by the last Muslim monarch on leaving his capital forever after the Christian conquest in 1492. The aim is to illustrate how, in migrating from its original context, this tale comes to signify and emblematize issues of gender and notions of history as progress specific to British culture. The poetic texts examined here employ the Spanish-Orientalist myth to elaborate ideas of masculinity and femininity, as well as reflections on power and its extinction, the fall of empires and the emergence of new states. Thus King Boabdil's tears were exotically popular also because they were removed from their original meaning and import, and refashioned into vehicles for ideological concerns proper to British Romantic-period culture

Download Full-text