Felicia Hemans and Jane Taylor

Felicia Hemans and Jane Taylor

The literacy world of the 19th century saw an emergence of female writers into the male dominated profession of poetry. Many men felt as though their profession was being invaded. They resented women entering the public sphere. This mentality in part helped influence which women were able to write and what they wrote about. Felicia Hemans and Jane Taylor are both women poets that emerged during the 19th century. Both women have used their poetry to help expand on traditional notions of romantic poetry during their lives.

In order to define romantic poetry on must look towards Bronte and Hemans male contemporaries at the time since their works influenced many other writers of that time. William Wordsworth and Coleridge both wrote criticisms on what made a good poet and what factors made up good poetry. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge defines the poet and poetry. He sees a "distinction from the poetic genius itself which sustains and modifies images of the own mind " (Coleridge). He believes in the power of exciting of the reader by using new "colours of imagination " to adhere to the truth of nature. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth describes the principal object of poetry to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing our nature. He wanted to use "the beautiful forms of nature" to write simplistically so that many could understand it. He attributes great poetry to a certain type of person: "For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought...

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...lower takes on many characteristics that women are expected to have. Words such as modest, lovely, bright, and fair are used to describe the flower. The flower knows nothing of this beauty and is content to bloom hidden away.

Yet it was content to bloom,

In modest tints arrayed;

And there diffused its sweet perfume,

Within the silent shade

The use of nature is another example of how she expanded on notions of romantic poetry. She delves into the relationship between the poet and nature. This binary relationship reflects other relevant binary relationships, namely, the masculine/feminine and subject/object relationships. This is interesting because the poet is female and still her writing reflects the ideals of the men around her. Her poem does make the woman the object to be gazed at and admired reinforcing patriarchal ideas surrounding writers of this time.