A Poetics of Reciprocity: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Ballads and Sonnets

<p>This thesis considers the way in which a selection of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (henceforth to be referred to as EBB) exhibits what I will refer to as a poetics of reciprocity. My focus is on EBB’s ballads of the 1830s and 40s, her amatory sonnet sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese, and those ballads found in Last Poems. Lyric poetry is, traditionally, said to be defined by a monologic lyric speaker. Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, pronounced that the mono-stylistic and cohesive nature of poetic language distinguished it from novelistic prose. However, it was, in part, Bakhtin’s insistence that poetry was by definition monologic that triggered my dialogic investigation of EBB’s poetry. Despite the range of work, both formal and temporal, that I consider in these three chapters, the discussion is nevertheless united by a consideration of EBB’s fascination with language, and her concomitant departure from the conventions of the monologic lyric speaker. In her early ballads, I explore EBB’s presentation of unreliable speakers and protagonists. These figures prove elusive to read because of their use of duplicitous or untrustworthy language, or they falter in the act of interpretation themselves. In EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, I consider the way in which the poet opts for the language of conversation to evoke, in a fresh and powerful manner, the love between her speaker and her beloved. I suggest that this strategy, in part, compensated for the way in which clichéd literary language used to describe the experience of loving had been drained of vigour. Finally, in Last Poems I consider EBB’s presentation of speech as a social act that is influenced by the speaker’s status in society. In these late ballads, women’s attempts to wield language in an effective way are demonstrated to be dependent upon various conditions that reduce or enhance the potency of their speech acts. While Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel,” in addition to the work of critics such as E. Warwick Slinn and Marjorie Stone, has been vital to the formulation of my thesis, I have, largely, relied upon a formalist approach to EBB’s poetry. In my close readings I examine EBB’s interrogation of language in her ballads and sonnets in light of her conscientious use, in particular, of metre and rhyme.</p>

A Poetics of Reciprocity: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Ballads and Sonnets

<p>This thesis considers the way in which a selection of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (henceforth to be referred to as EBB) exhibits what I will refer to as a poetics of reciprocity. My focus is on EBB’s ballads of the 1830s and 40s, her amatory sonnet sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese, and those ballads found in Last Poems. Lyric poetry is, traditionally, said to be defined by a monologic lyric speaker. Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, pronounced that the mono-stylistic and cohesive nature of poetic language distinguished it from novelistic prose. However, it was, in part, Bakhtin’s insistence that poetry was by definition monologic that triggered my dialogic investigation of EBB’s poetry. Despite the range of work, both formal and temporal, that I consider in these three chapters, the discussion is nevertheless united by a consideration of EBB’s fascination with language, and her concomitant departure from the conventions of the monologic lyric speaker. In her early ballads, I explore EBB’s presentation of unreliable speakers and protagonists. These figures prove elusive to read because of their use of duplicitous or untrustworthy language, or they falter in the act of interpretation themselves. In EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, I consider the way in which the poet opts for the language of conversation to evoke, in a fresh and powerful manner, the love between her speaker and her beloved. I suggest that this strategy, in part, compensated for the way in which clichéd literary language used to describe the experience of loving had been drained of vigour. Finally, in Last Poems I consider EBB’s presentation of speech as a social act that is influenced by the speaker’s status in society. In these late ballads, women’s attempts to wield language in an effective way are demonstrated to be dependent upon various conditions that reduce or enhance the potency of their speech acts. While Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel,” in addition to the work of critics such as E. Warwick Slinn and Marjorie Stone, has been vital to the formulation of my thesis, I have, largely, relied upon a formalist approach to EBB’s poetry. In my close readings I examine EBB’s interrogation of language in her ballads and sonnets in light of her conscientious use, in particular, of metre and rhyme.</p>

‘Not Death, but Love’

In 2009, a long-unlocated notebook—MSS, by ElizabethBBarrett—re-entered the public domain, including among its contents a sequence titled Sonnets in the night and a previously uncatalogued and unknown draft of ‘Sonnet V’ of Sonnets from the Portuguese, predating all extant manuscripts of this much studied work. The first section of this chapter (Kirstie Blair) analyses the making and unmaking of Sonnets in the night, considering its intricate ordering and EBB’s disassembling of an elegiac sequence which, if published in its notebook form, might have anticipated Tennyson’s In Memoriam in its thematic motifs (voice, song, silence, tears, work, consolation). Section II (Marjorie Stone) further analyses this unmaking in exploring the complicated relations between EBB’s elegiac sequence and Sonnet V of Sonnets from the Portuguese, arguing that composition of the amatory sequence may have begun with the tangled, turbulent draft of this pivotal sonnet, connecting smouldering grief to newly awakened love.

Neue Gedichte

This chapter attends to the idea of ‘thing-poetry’, but less as a poetry about things than as poems which aspire to the condition of things. Rilke’s new material sense of poetic language, under the influence of Rodin, is given special attention, his deliberate efforts to come to terms with the specificity of language, his awareness of it as a medium that is ‘obstacle and vehicle’ (W. S. Graham) at once. Rilke’s use of the sonnet is important here, and a sign of Rilke’s new consciousness of poetic tradition. In this context there is a comparative reading of Rilke’s sonnet ‘Leda’ and Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’. For the first time translation becomes an integral part of his work (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese). This is looked at, along with the influence of Baudelaire, who shaped Rilke’s whole experience of Paris, and whose importance, though acknowledged, has still not been given the attention it deserves.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Perception, Feeling and Thought of Love, and Early Married Life in "Sonnets from the Portuguese"

The objectives of this research are to discover Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s perception, feelings, and thoughts of love and to observe her early married life with her husband as depicted in her Sonnets from the Portuguese. The expressive theory is used to find the perception, feeling, and thought of the author depicted in it. The primary data or the main object of the research is the literary work itself.The results of this research show that the perceptions of love are the products ofElizabeth’s expressive act in conceiving the love itself with deep understanding which involves the realization of position and respect of her lover and herself. However, her ideas of love are defeated by her emotion of love. Moreover, she is encouraged by the power of love to make consideration in her life to choose her own course of life that she surrenders her life to her lover by agreeing to marry Robert Browning which shows her greatest expressive act of love. Thus, love has given her the opportunity to gain happiness in her life time.

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

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.