Abstract
Felicia Hemans and Thomas Lovell Beddoes both frequently write about death. Stewart shows that their work helps us consider the way poets in this period thought about time and the possibility that their poems might last. For both poets the apparition was a crucial figure for poetry. Drawing on discussions of apparitions in nineteenth-century science, Stewart shows that the form allowed these poets to think doubtfully, but also productively, about poetic forms that must hope for an attentive reading to bring them to life. Rather than a simple faith that their poems can ‘live’ to reach an audience in posterity, the poets of this period present a much more subtle, and more doubtful, consideration of what it means to persist through time.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Bloom, Visionary Company, 446.
- 2.
It was this materialism that disturbed another writer on the topic who sought to correct Hibbert: Past Feelings Renovated; or, Ideas Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Hibbert’s ‘Philosophy of Apparitions’, Written with the View of Counteracting any Sentiments Approaching Materialism, which that Work, However Unintentional on the Part of the Author, May Have a Tendency to Produce (1828).
- 3.
Ferris, ‘“Before Our Eyes”: Romantic Historical Fiction and the Apparitions of Reading’, 65.
- 4.
Ferriar, 48, 50.
- 5.
Ferriar, 43.
- 6.
Miller, ‘“Striking Passages”: Memory and the Romantic Imprint’, 31.
- 7.
A fevered, camp article by John Wilson on the annuals discusses apparitions at some length: Blackwood’s 26 (December 1827), 971.
- 8.
Two other contributions by Landon to this volume (‘The Indian Orphan’ and ‘The Ruined Cottage’) involve endings with corpses. Even ‘The Parting Charge’ (addressed to a departing lover) has a hint of ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ in its conclusion: ‘Around my neck there is a band,/‘Tis made of thy dark hair’ (55).
- 9.
Mitchell, ‘Suspended Animation, Slow Time, and the Poetics of Trance’. Landon has a story on the topic, ‘The Talisman’, in The Book of Beauty (1833), 55–110.
- 10.
‘Presented with Mrs Hemans’s Records of Woman’ was published anonymously by a male colonial officer in Guiana: Midnight Musings (1832), 65–6.
- 11.
I will follow Julie Melnyk’s suggestion that Hemans’s poetry can be divided into three phases: an early public phase, a middle ‘affectional’ phase covering the 1820s, and a later religious phase from 1830–5 (‘Hemans’s Later Poetry: Religion and the Vatic Poet’). I will focus here on the middle phase, with some discussion of her later, more pointedly religious, work.
- 12.
Letter of 5 May 1826, quoted in Susan Wolfson, ed. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, 268. With the exception of poems from Records of Woman, references to Hemans’s poetry and prose are to this edition.
- 13.
I do not have space here to consider fully what is now a diverse and complex field of Hemans studies, but that field has had a significant influence on my work on her and also the wider culture of poetry in this period. See my discussion of her critics in the Introduction.
- 14.
Latané, ‘Who Counts? Popularity, Modern Recovery, and the Early Nineteenth-Century Woman Poet’, 214–15.
- 15.
Kate Singer and Nanora Sweet , ‘Beyond Domesticity: Felicia Hemans in the Wider World’, 2.
- 16.
Felski, The Limits of Critique. Felski’s work builds on earlier interventions by Bruno Latour: see ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’.
- 17.
Best and Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, 11.
- 18.
See Hemans, Records of Woman, ed. Paula R. Feldman, 197.
- 19.
Rudy, ‘Hemans’s Passion’, 550.
- 20.
Blair, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion, 40–3, 92–6.
- 21.
The Amulet (1835), 238–41 (238).
- 22.
Andrew Stauffer’s work in ‘Hemans by the Book’ on the responses of Hemans’s American readers in the nineteenth century indicates the importance of her religion to them.
- 23.
Lootens, ‘Hemans and Home’.
- 24.
Nichols, ‘Glorification of the Lowly’, 559.
- 25.
References to poems from Records of Woman are to Paula R. Feldman’s edition: here ‘Pauline’, ll. 89–90.
- 26.
Saglia, ‘“A Deeper and Richer Music”’, 352.
- 27.
Gates, ‘Fixing Memory’, 64.
- 28.
Smith, Artful, 53.
- 29.
Armstrong, ‘Natural and National Monuments’, 228, 222.
- 30.
Chorley, Memorials of Mrs Hemans, 1: 195–6.
- 31.
Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, 175.
- 32.
Rudy, ‘Hemans’s Passion’, 557.
- 33.
Jewsbury, ‘Literary Sketches No. 1: Felicia Hemans’, Athenaeum 172 (12 Feb 1831), 104–5, quoted in Wolfson, ed., Felicia Hemans, 564.
- 34.
Leighton, On Form, 222.
- 35.
‘The American Forest Girl’ and ‘A Voyager’s Dream of Land’ offer further examples in Records of Woman.
- 36.
Hemans frequently has poems about dead objects, which seem, to the characters, still to linger in life: ‘Ivan the Czar’, ‘Juana’, ‘Costanza’, ‘The Queen of Prussia’, and ‘The Child’s Last Sleep’, for example (all taken from Records of Woman).
- 37.
References, unless indicated, are to The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes ed. H. W. Donner; here 1:1:24–6.
- 38.
‘Another Letter to the Same’ (a verse letter to Bryan Waller Procter, March 1826), l. 47.
- 39.
Daniel Karlin, ‘On Being Second-Rate: The Skeleton Art of Thomas Lovell Beddoes’. See also Bloom, Visionary Company, 439–44.
- 40.
Saintsbury, History, 3: 150; Ricks, The Force of Poetry, 147.
- 41.
Strachey, ‘The Last Elizabethan’, 211.
- 42.
The phrase is John Ashbery’s, Other Traditions, 35. The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, eds. Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw, offers a number of contributions which place Beddoes in his historical and material contexts. The other two most important books in this respect are Berns’s Science, Politics, and Friendship in the Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Bradshaw’s Resurrection Songs: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes.
- 43.
Bradshaw, ‘The Jest-Book, the Body, and the State’, 80.
- 44.
The Ivory Gate: Later Poems and Fragments, ed. Alan Halsey, 9.
- 45.
See Christopher Moylan, ‘“For Luz is a Good Joke”: Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Jewish Eschatology’. Beddoes discusses the search for ‘luz’ in Death’s Jest-Book.
- 46.
See Bradshaw, Resurrection Songs.
- 47.
Procter’s ‘Werner’ draws on Godwin’s St Leon and Byron’s Manfred: see, under his pseudonym Barry Cornwall, Dramatic Scenes and Other Poems (1819). Beddoes admired Mary Shelley and idolised her late husband. He was glad to hear that she published a Last Man and was sure ‘in almost every respect she will do much better than either’ him or Thomas Campbell (Letters, 104).
- 48.
Quoting The Brides’ Tragedy, 4.3, 67–70.
- 49.
John Wilson in Blackwood’s praised The Brides’ Tragedy: ‘His language, it will be seen, is elegant and his versification constructed on a good principle. It is dramatic’: ‘Notices of the Modern British Dramatists: No. II—Beddoes’, Blackwood’s 14 (December 1823), 729. Death’s Jest-Book was staged in 2003 in a version by Jerome McGann directed by Frederick Burwick. Bradshaw notes that the 1829 text is, for all its difficulties, clearly designed with the stage in mind (Death’s Jest-Book: The 1829 Text, ed. Bradshaw , xxi). A letter to Kelsall, written as the 1829 text was nearing completion, discusses the importance of writing for the stage, ‘the highest aim of the dramatist’ (Letters, 158).
- 50.
Beddoes’ letters to his friends around the time he completed the 1829 version of Death’s Jest-Book indicate his hopes to make a splash. The ‘Preface’ he wrote claims it ‘is written for those who can find entertainment in it’ and bullishly claims to hope the reviewers will do him the honour of finding it ‘guilty of almost every literary offence’ (Bradshaw, ed., Death’s Jest-Book, 6). Beddoes is often considered a revivalist of the Elizabethan tradition, though in beginning Death’s Jest-Book he said of Marlowe and Webster that ‘they are ghosts—the worm is in their pages—& we want to see something that our great-grandsires did not know’ (Letters, 50).
- 51.
Michael O’Neill, ‘“A Storm of Ghosts”: Beddoes, Shelley, Death, and Reputation’, 115, 109.
- 52.
Ferriar, 42, 52.
- 53.
References to Death’s Jest-Book are to the β text in Donner, the version of the text prepared for publication in 1829, and published by Michael Bradshaw as the ‘1829 text’: Death’s Jest-Book, ed. Bradshaw.
- 54.
See Mitchell, ‘Suspended Animation’.
- 55.
In Death’s Jest-Book, Kate remarks of Mandrake: ‘Alas! that my/poor husband’s ghost should not know that he is dead! but he/was ever absent’ (2:1:99–101); in The Second Brother: ‘Persuade me/To hope that I am not a wretched woman,/Who knows she has an husband by his absence’ (2:1:70–2).
- 56.
Hazlitt, Complete Works, 9: 58.
- 57.
The Last Man, Fragment XXII, ‘Life a Glass Window’, ll. 1–6.
- 58.
The Last Man, Fragment XLIV, ‘Life’s Uncertainty’, l. 9.
- 59.
Michael Bradshaw offers a fascinating account of posterity in Beddoes. He argues that ‘In his last poems Beddoes can be seen to construct a literary posterity involving the negative implications of his own reputation. He pointedly does not use posterity as a form of immortality, or repository for the projected fulfilment of thwarted hopes. Instead, he seeks to shape it by his absence and silence’ (Resurrection Songs, 217). This is not quite true of the earlier verse, I think, which tests out the possibility of his poetry’s survival in some form.
- 60.
Michael O’Neill, ‘“The latch-string of a new world’s wicket”: Poetry and Agency in Death’s Jest-Book; or, The Fool’s Tragedy’, 46, 45. See also Bradshaw, Resurrection Songs, 49.
- 61.
Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall), review of The Brides’ Tragedy, London Magazine, 7 (February 1823), 170, 169.
- 62.
Leighton, On Form, 102, 105.
- 63.
Bradshaw, ‘The Jest-Book, the Body, and the State’, 79.
- 64.
Hazlitt, Complete Works, 8: 100.
- 65.
Letters, 158. Ute Berns offers a theoretically sophisticated understanding of his interest in the past, present, and future and their ‘mutual interdependence’: Science, Politics, and Friendship, 121.
- 66.
Bradshaw, Resurrection Songs, 20.
- 67.
Berns and Bradshaw, eds., Ashgate Research Companion, 18.
- 68.
He wrote to Kelsall about The Anniversary (1829), which contains a different graveside meditation by Darley (Letters, 158).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stewart, D. (2018). ‘A Fatal Gift’: Formal Apparitions in Hemans and Beddoes. In: The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70512-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70512-5_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-70511-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70512-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)