Felicia Hemans and Jane Taylor Essay - 1093 Words

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.†¦show more content†¦Women were not seen as equal players in terms of writing. Felicia Hemans was one of the most prolific, critically admired, best selling poets of her generation as well as one if the first women to make a living by publishing her writing. Hemans emerged as a successful poetess and was celebrated. Her poetry was so popular that many were public favourites, memorised, and some even set to music. Poems such Casabianca and Englands Dead classified Hemans a poet of imperial and domestic ideology. Hemans work demonstrates many of the traditional genres of the time such as nation and the individual, war and peace, the lives of female domestic lives, and the child martyr. A prime example of this is in the poem Casabianca: The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battles wreck Shone round him oer the dead. Yet beautiful and bright he stood, As born to rule the storm - A creature of heroic blood, A proud, though child-like form. The flames rolled on - he would not go Without his fathers word; That father, faint in death below, His voice no longer heard. He called aloud:- Say, father, say If yet my task is done! He knew not that the chieftain lay Unconscious of his son. Speak, father! once again he cried, If I may yet be gone! And but the booming shots replied And fast the flames rolled on. Upon his brow he felt their breath, And in his waiving hair, And