Sappho's Conversions in Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Christina Rossetti

Linley, Margaret

doi:10.3828/eir.4.1.2

Essays in Romanticism

1996

DOI: 10.3828/eir.4.1.2

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Sappho's Conversions in Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Christina Rossetti

Margaret Linley¹

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Cited by 6 publications

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“…The rhetorical premise of Robinson's abolitionist poem, like that of modernist novels, is that Zelma's speech, when ventriloquized by Robinson, can “write beyond the ending.” That, of course, is the premise as well of many poems about Sappho's “Last Song.” Such sustained resonance does not accord with the emphasis of many critics on what Margaret Reynolds calls “the nothingness and absence” that follow self‐immolation in Sapphic poems, where the incompatibility of art and love subjects the protagonist to a double‐death, both physically and aesthetically (280). For Larry Lipking, the poems of the abandoned woman‐poet stage an anti‐epic in which “No action ensues” (82), and other readers, as Margaret Linley notes, find that the inner split of the suicide renders the protagonist “powerless to act” (17). Emotional death determines poetic death.…”

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“this winged nature fraught”: Suicide and Agency in Women's Poetry

Higonnet

2015

Literature Compass

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This essay focuses on representations of female suicide by Romantic poets Felicia Hemans and Mary Robinson. In short lyric narratives, the two poets exploited themes of maternal, revolutionary, and Sapphic suicide. Their literary representations of women's voluntary death can both draw from and generate narratives of political resistance: the repudiation of slavery, of empire, of tyranny. Female suicide may also invoke discourses about the nature and function of poetic voice, genre, and authorship. Selected fatal moments point toward the political and metapoetic implications of gesture and voice. In the penultimate sonnet of Robinson's Sappho and Phaon, for example, the classical poet-the tenth museref lects upon her impending death. Perched on the Leucadian rock, Sappho gazes up at the sky, and not down toward her watery grave;Robinson's imagery suggests soaring f light rather than precipitous fall. Sappho anticipates posthumous fame more triumphant, more transcendent, than that which she achieved in life: then shall "loftier passions prompt the loftier theme!" In this way Sappho's suicidal genius stands in for the neglected genius of Romantic women writers; it figures the self-ref lexive, paradoxical condition of the female writer at once legitimated and effaced by the authorial role. For these authors, the rhetoric and imagery of female suicide does not provide textual closure, nor does it determine, finally, a poem's meaning. Rather, suicide opens up the text. This paper focuses on two Romantic women poets' representations of female suicide. In both lyric and epic modes, Mary Robinson and Felicia Hemans exploited themes of maternal, revolutionary, and Sapphic suicide. A substantial body of criticism has been written about these poems, as well as about the related topic of the "female sublime." It is generally assumed that the female sublime differs from the male sublime (Yaeger, Freeman, Wright); in turn, a gendered sublime has been implicated in the representation of suicide (Thomas, Higonnet). For some readers, the voice of the female suicide is self-divided and in some sense defeated: grief and despair overwhelm the woman's identity as a poet (Lipking 82, Leighton 3). Ruth Salvaggio has suggested that "the very idea of woman became a metaphor and figure of the essence of exclusion -of not being, of absence," whose locus is "the repressed, the censured" (3, 5). While the tension between abandoned lover and woman poet is generally understood as resolved in death by the silencing of the poet, radical self-denial may be balanced by selfconfidence in the woman poet's art. Kari Lokke argues that where isolation seems most acute, when the female poet is most lovelorn, her disappointment "becomes a catalyst for the cultivation of heightened political, spiritual, and historical awareness" (Tracing 7). The voice of the poet reaches out to a "collective" selfhood. We might say that the aporia of suicide lines up with the aporia of the sublime, where blockage triggers transcendence.Such speculations may rest on a few ...

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“this winged nature fraught”: Suicide and Agency in Women's Poetry

Higonnet

2015

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Re‐Envisioning the Sublime: L.E.L.'sValley of Linmouth

Svampa

2008

Literature Compass

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This essay won the 2007 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Romanticism Section. The English romantic poetess Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-38), better known as L.E.L., published Valley of Linmouth in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-Book in 1836. This article examines this single poem and reconsiders the interaction between the message of form and the logic of content. Predicated on the belief that Landon's re-envisioning of the myths of the sublime and of the solitary genius may be most fully appreciated only through greater attention to language, form, and style, this analysis examines her work in relation to Immanuel Kant's Analytic of the Sublime, showing how she attempted to escape the Burkean gendered dichotomy of the beautiful versus the sublime. Additionally, it highlights the dialogue Landon established with some texts of other English romantic poets. Understanding of Landon's form is critical to avoiding relegation of her work to 'formlessness', thus endorsing the traditional prejudice against women's poetry. Valley of Linmouth's combination of clear structure and subtle ambiguities demands a closer reading; comparison of the poem to other texts, and consideration of the same within the entire context of production of Landon's works, underscores both the bold individuality and peculiarity of the poet's discourse.

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Victorian Bibliography for 1998

Cohen¹

2000

vic

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Sappho's Conversions in Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Christina Rossetti

Cited by 6 publications

References 2 publications

“this winged nature fraught”: Suicide and Agency in Women's Poetry

“this winged nature fraught”: Suicide and Agency in Women's Poetry

Re‐Envisioning the Sublime: L.E.L.'sValley of Linmouth

Victorian Bibliography for 1998

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