The Poems Of Anna Letitia Barbauld

This volume brings together for the first time all the known poems of English writer Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825), a once esteemed but long neglected figure whose career spanned the Age of Sensibility and the Romantic Era. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft have collected 170 of her poems, including twenty-three previously unpublished and eleven conjectural attributions. This is the first scholarly edition of any writings of Barbauld, a brilliant woman whose interests ranged from literary criticism to history and affairs of state to children’s stories. At the end of the eighteenth century, Barbauld may well have been the most eminent living poet, male or female, in Britain. Barbauld belongs almost equally to two generations. Her verse displays an eighteenth-century adherence to balance, common sense, and poetic diction and meter, but it also celebrates the individual, the passionate, and the fanciful in a clearly Romantic manner. In the current reconfiguring of Romanticism, Barbauld provides an important contrast to the major male poets who have, until recently, defined the era--poets who clearly acknowledged her influence on their own work, yet who played a role in Barbauld’s lapse into obscurity in the century after her death. Coleridge, before a serious falling out with Barbauld, admired her greatly, and Wordsworth confessed that he wished the final eight lines of her poem “Life” had been of his own composing. Walter Savage Landor ranked her “Summer Evening’s Meditation” among the finest poems in the English language. Barbauld’s poems have retained their capacity to delight readers; they are witty, learned, imaginative, and unpredictable in both choice and treatment of subject. Read as a whole, this collection reveals a striking variety of style and voice and provides the basis for a major--and long overdue--reevaluation of Barbauld’s poetry. McCarthy and Kraft present unmodernized texts of the poems that reflect as nearly as possible the author’s final intention and give variant readings in textual notes. A lengthy introduction includes a discussion of the poems, a history of their composition and publication, and an outline of Barbauld’s life and writing career.

At her death in 1825, Anna Letitia Barbauld was considered one of the great writers of her time. Distinguished as a poet and essayist, she was also in innovator in children’s literature, an eloquent supporter of liberal politics, and a literary critic of stature. This edition includes a generous selection of her poetry and the first comprehensive body of her prose in more than a century, with essays—some never before reprinted—on literature, religion, education, prejudice, women’s fashions, and class conflict.

Winner, 2011 Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2009 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Against the background of the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, and the struggle for religious equality in Great Britain, a brilliant, embattled woman strove to defend Enlightenment values to her nation. Poet, teacher, essayist, political writer, editor, and critic, Anna Letitia Barbauld was venerated by contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, among them the young Walter Scott, the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Boston Unitarians such as William Ellery Channing. After decades in the historical limbo into which almost all work by women writers of her era was swept, Barbauld's writings on citizenly ethics, identity politics, church-state relations, and empire are still deeply relevant today. Inquiring and witty as well as principled and passionate, Barbauld was a voice for the Enlightenment in an age of revolution and reaction. Based on more than fifteen years of research in dozens of libraries and archives across five countries, this is the first full-length biography of one of the foremost women writers in Georgian England. "A superb biography that brings a radical literary figure back into the picture . . . a thrilling, brilliant book."—Guardian "McCarthy establishes Barbauld as a figure of major significance. His magnificent biography will draw many others to her, and give her a new and deserved prominence in Enlightenment and Romantic studies."—Women's Writing "A tour de force . . . Honest, wise, original."—Eighteenth-Century Studies William McCarthy is professor emeritus of English at Iowa State University. He is the coeditor of The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld and the author of Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman.

Anna Letitia Barbauld was one of the most important poets of the Romantic period, and her work remains influential to this day. This collection of her poems includes some of her most famous works, including 'To a Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible'. With an introduction by a prominent literary scholar and a selection of critical essays, this book is an essential resource for anyone interested in the history of poetry and the Romantic period. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

In this first critical study of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s major work, Daniel P. Watkins reveals the singular purpose of Barbauld’s visionary poems: to recreate the world based on the values of liberty and justice. Watkins examines in close detail both the form and content of Barbauld’s Poems, originally published in 1773 and revised and reissued in 1792. Along with careful readings of the poems that situate the works in their broader political, historical, and philosophical contexts, Watkins explores the relevance of the introductory epigraphs and the importance of the poems’ placement throughout the volume. Centering his study on Barbauld’s effort to develop a visionary poetic stance, Watkins argues that the deliberate arrangement of the poems creates a coherent portrayal of Barbauld’s poetic, political, and social vision, a far-sighted sagacity born of her deep belief that the principles of love, sympathy, liberty, and pacifism are necessary for a secure and meaningful human reality. In tracing the contours of this effort, Watkins examines, in particular, the tension in Barbauld’s poetry between her desire to engage directly with the political realities of the world and her equally strong longing for a pastoral world of peace and prosperity. Scholars of British literature and women writers will welcome this important study of one of the eighteenth century’s foremost writers.

The Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld presents, for the first time, all the known surviving works of this major English writer, who lived from 1743 to 1825. Poet, essayist, editor, innovative writer for children, polemicist for religious and political reform, Barbauld helped set the agenda for Anglo-American culture for over a century. Her poems influenced Coleridge and Wordsworth; her writings on education, church-state relations, identity politics, and the ethics of citizenship are freshly relevant today; her commentary on books and writers went far to establish today's canon of English novelists. Beyond their importance, her writings are distinguished by great charm and profound intelligence. Volume I presents all of Anna Letitia Barbauld's known poems, drawing on manuscript and printed sources that were not known in 1994, when the last standard edition of Barbauld's poems was published. William McCarthy's critical edition adds new poems to Barbauld's canon, and removes several found to be doubtful. It takes into account the surprising number of early American texts. It revisits the question of copy-texts and makes different choices of them. It re-dates several poems and corrects and supplements annotations. It notices reprints, which played a major role in creating Barbauld's after-image on both shores of the Atlantic. The Poems, Revised, is the new standard edition today, indispensable for all students of Barbauld's work.