Gender, Emotion and Transcendence In John Keats' “Ode On Melanchholy" and Felicia Dorothea Hemans' "Ode to Cheerfulness"

Introduction Melancholy has been tied to the Romantic literary tradition and its preoccupation with intensely emotional experiences, as well as the poetic forms that best accommodate them. Odes, elegies and laments are remarkably prominent in the Romantic canon and have come to epitomize the nineteenth century as a time “steeped in melancholy” (Bowring 38). While Romanticism is largely remembered as an age of melancholy, there were many women poets who were unable to fully access these expressions of sorrow, therefore relying on more joyful emotions that are not as closely associated with the period. Poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote on topics of mild sentiment and the domestic, working within structures of feminine identity that were both acceptable and commercial. Although these writers often fought against such conventions in their work, the masculine gendering of melancholy and its connection to poetic genius and transcendence ultimately reduces the ability of women writers to achieve an eternal reputation in the canon of Romantic literature.

Gender, Emotion and Transcendence In John Keats' “Ode On Melanchholy" and Felicia Dorothea Hemans' "Ode to Cheerfulness"

Introduction Melancholy has been tied to the Romantic literary tradition and its preoccupation with intensely emotional experiences, as well as the poetic forms that best accommodate them. Odes, elegies and laments are remarkably prominent in the Romantic canon and have come to epitomize the nineteenth century as a time “steeped in melancholy” (Bowring 38). While Romanticism is largely remembered as an age of melancholy, there were many women poets who were unable to fully access these expressions of sorrow, therefore relying on more joyful emotions that are not as closely associated with the period. Poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote on topics of mild sentiment and the domestic, working within structures of feminine identity that were both acceptable and commercial. Although these writers often fought against such conventions in their work, the masculine gendering of melancholy and its connection to poetic genius and transcendence ultimately reduces the ability of women writers to achieve an eternal reputation in the canon of Romantic literature.

Felicia Hemans and the Birth of the Mass-Market Woman Poet

This chapter focuses the career of Felicia Hemans, one of the first women writers to achieve widespread fame as a mass-market poet. I begin with an overview of the revolution in print that corresponded with the span of Hemans’s career, 1808 to 1835. While Hemans’s poems might have made their first appearance in books or periodicals priced at one shilling or more, they were among the most frequently reprinted content in periodicals and newspapers aimed at broad audiences that included working-class and lower-middle-class readers. In the second part of this chapter, I use Hemans’s poem ‘The Better Land’ as a case study for exploring how the practice of reprinting enabled the dissemination of her work to mass-market audiences and niche readerships. In the third section of this chapter, I explore the history of American reprintings of Hemans’s poetry, highlighting how she negotiated the lack of international copyright protection for British authors in order to harness new markets abroad. I close the chapter by exploring a posthumously published poem, ‘To My Own Portrait.’ Its circulation in memorials after Hemans’s death tells us much about emergent visual print culture, which defined the ‘poetess’ as both a celebrity author and a pictorial image.

Felicia Hemans (1793 - 1835)

Portrait of the poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans

Remapping the Printed Page in Women’s Post-Waterloo Poetry

This chapter reveals how women poets in the brief Post-Waterloo period used linguistic and structural play to resist stable notions of femininity, war, and the text itself. Felicia Hemans and critically overlooked Jane Alice Sargant manipulated the printed page to map new movements between supposedly separate bodies and texts to uncover half-hidden voices that counter limited ideologies of wartime participation. Hemans and Sargant created this new page by guiding readers’ eyes across juxtaposing genres, gendered bodies, nonhuman natures, battlefield accoutrements, and quoted speech. The chapter argues that these manipulations of body, gender, and text critique expected materialities of war and war poetry that relied on gender distinctions to determine one’s role and place during war.