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Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class.Heart Beatsis the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived. Heart Beatsbegins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's \"Casabianca,\" Thomas Gray's \"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,\" and Charles Wolfe's \"Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.\" To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's \"Invictus\" and Rudyard Kipling's \"If--,\" asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today. Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities,Heart Beatsis an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.

Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics, 1800–1830: Romantic Crises is a study of the political lives of William Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans between 1800 and 1830. Benjamin Kim argues that the dominant paradigm for their political thought was that of “crisis.” Obsessed with the mysterious connections between the individual, the home, and the state, Wordsworth and Hemans portrayed all three in a common crisis that would be resolved in the future. Both writers articulated historical moments when the tenuousness of the present society gives glimpses into a future one. Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics presents revisionary readings of major works and contributes to long-standing discussions on a number of different topics such as dissenting politics, poor relief, gender roles in peace and wartime, and the nature of historical memory. By focusing on the dramatic nature of the narratives of crisis, Kim adds complexity to the master narratives of the Romantic period that so often limit and simplify political expression.

Rather than a scholarly Orientalism or one based on travel to the “East,” Hemans orients the subject in an aesthetics of representation that is bound by the self-created imaginary of the text. For Spivak, the subaltern cannot speak because of her non-subject status. [...]it is the duty of both the “female intellectual” and more broadly, the postcolonial theorist, to reconstruct history from the viewpoint of the marginalized, as Hemans attempts in “The Indian City.” Hemans’s imagined poetic solidarity in Records features nineteen poems with women protagonists from history and contemporary life, including Joan of Arc, Lady Arabella Stuart, Italian sculptress Properzia Rossi, an unnamed Native American woman, and Indian war leader, Maimuna. Through Maimuna’s complicated representation and the uncharacteristic tetrameter, Hemans yokes together form/content experimentation to pose a new type of intersectionality for individual and collective feminist solidarity.

Even our own attention as modern readers has a somatic bent: as Tricia Lootens notes, the enduring critical tendency for a \"histrionic shying-away from sentimental verse [continues to present] itself as a healthy response to texts conceived as contagious, fleshly bodies of bad faith\" (16; emphasis added). [...]Alicia Jane Sparrow's poetic response to Browne's first poetry volume emphasizes Browne's blindness both as central to her genius and as a source of wonder and inspiration.1 The final stanza of Sparrow's poem asks her imagined version of Browne if the feeling of the sun's rays, the hint of a rose's fragrance, and the sound of a wood-dove singing to her mate are what \"give[s] thee gleams of bright-winged things, with loving human eyes?\" \"Oh!\" Sparrow continues, \"Chained in dark captivity upon a sunless shore, / Sweet child of genius, tell me, where hast thou learn'd thy lore?\" (117).2 Like Letitia Elizabeth Landon's poem for Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's for Landon (discussed by Beverly Taylor elsewhere in this forum), Sparrow's poem in its use of apostrophe to address the absent and silent Browne allows Sparrow, herself a poetess, to define Browne for her readers and create a narrative that serves her own branding. In this case, Sparrow clearly positions Browne's work as limited by blindness in contrast to the critical and informed poetics of the sighted poetess who can see with \"human eyes\" and learn poetic \"lore\" from knowable sources. Reading Browne as part of this tradition encourages a re-evaluation of her poetry by highlighting the artificial and arbitrary nature of the poetess designation and the way such categories shape reception and interpretation of female poets from this era.

The White Wampum (London: John Lane, 1895), Canadian Born (Toronto: Morang, 1903), and Flint and Feather, erroneously described as her \"Complete Poems\" (Toronto: Musson, 1912 and many later editions).4 At the time of her death from breast cancer on 7 March 1913, three days before her fifty-second birthday, Pauline Johnson was Canada's best-known female poet. The outspoken first-person female voices in her best-known performance narratives counter the self-sacrificing Native woman of Felicia Hemans's \"Indian Woman's Death Song,\" a trope that Johnson vehemently rejected.7 Asserting Indigenous rights to recognition and fairness, the speaker of \"A Cry from an Indian Wife\" proclaims \"By right, by birth, we Indians own these lands\" (Collected 15), while in \"The Cattle Thief,\" the daughter of the murdered Cree chief (who was not stealing anything) berates British settlers for robbing her people of land and food: \"How have you paid us for our game? How paid us for our land? / By a book to save our souls from the sins you brought in your other hand\" (Collected 99). In The Political Poetess, Lootens has much to say about African Americans, but Native Americans appear only in relation to her discussion of Felicia Hemans's \"Indian Woman's Death Song\" (65–67).

[...]for some Romantic writers like Hemans, suicide reflects both women's autonomy and the indissoluble nature of the maternal bond as she significantly transfigures this paradigm by rendering suicide an interpersonal event insofar as it is often accompanied by infanticide in her writing. Contrary to Durkheim's claim that \"Where the family exists, it protects against suicide,\" suicide in many of Hemans's poems in fact arises directly from domestic concerns, and is typically read as expressive of the poet's own melancholic reflections on her personal circumstances (462).1 Although I am not suggesting that Hemans's poetic personae are necessarily autobiographical, her work appears especially preoccupied with suicide in foregrounding the deaths of women, specifically maternal figures who choose to expire with their children in poems such as \"The Suliote Mother,\" \"The Wife of Asdrubal,\" and \"The Indian Woman's Death Song,\" among others. The wife's reproach naturalizes masculine desertion and clearly positions the husband and father outside of the familial structure in his choice to preserve his life at the expense of his family's honor. Yet, the mother's appealing \"glance on high\" (her last definitive action) furthers the emphasis on vision in these final lines and appeals to a divine observer to sanction this final act in which the mother's act of \"clasping\" the children to her breast is privileged over the subsequent infanticide.

2 It does so not by addressing McGann’s substantial body of work on individual women writers—on Felicia Hemans, L. E. L., Mary Robinson, Ann Batten Cristall, and Christina Rossetti—but rather by extending McGann’s powerful insights into a consideration of how we as scholars can participate in the material transformation of the archive, in this case, the archive of women’s writing. Calling for a full implementation of McGann’s understanding that textual criticism and bibliography are “conceptually fundamental rather than preliminary to the study of literature,”3 this article seeks to establish that scholarly attention to female literary production, transmission, and preservation is imperative for the study of women’s literature. According to Assmann, active cultural forgetting “is implied in intentional acts such as trashing and destroying,” whereas the passive form “is related to non-intentional acts such as losing, hiding, dispersing, neglecting, abandoning, or leaving something behind.” Using a simple metric to determine a set of female writers equivalent to the ‘big six’—by counting the number of pages they are allotted in leading anthologies—we find that the top six female writers are, in order, Mary Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Joanna Baillie.14 What of their literary manuscripts are extant?

This essay considers Charlotte Brooke in Ireland, Anne Grant in Scotland, and Felicia Hemans in Wales, analyzing the various ways in which they promoted their nations’ oral culture during what is now called the Romantic era. Examining these women and their intermedial work can help us build a fuller picture of women’s contributions to book history throughout the British Isles, as well as better appreciate the role of orality, including voice and song, within a book history tradition frequently oriented toward print and manuscript. The essay also discusses these women writers’ subsequent disappearance from their respective national canons, as projects to legitimize the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh nations have focused overwhelmingly on the printed productions of male creative writers.

When Felicia Hemans died, in May 1835, Landon quickly published sorrowful verses memorializing the event in July's New Monthly Magazine, celebrating Hemans's poetic accomplishment but lamenting the painful isolation imposed by artistic genius. Whereas the classical elegy expressed grief and loss, it also achieved a counterweight of philosophical consolation, concluding with the mourner's anticipating that through poetry the dead poet (and also the poem's mourning speaker) will achieve immortality.7 In contrast, melancholy sentiment dominates LEL's entire poem. Impatient with Landon's unchecked tears and failure to recognize the worthwhile cost of a true artistic gift, EBB upbraids LEL's morose sentiment, tersely commanding: \"Be happy\" (29). In her poem's earliest version, the stanzaic pattern of EBB's response to LEL's lament for Hemans paid homage to both poetesses by emulating LEL's ballad stanzas, which similarly acknowledged Hemans's using ballad stanzas in her elegy on the death of Mary Tighe (\"The Grave of a Poetess\").8 But in the third iteration of her poem, EBB combined the short tetrameter and trimeter lines that echoed LEL's ballad stanzas to achieve heptameter lines, thereby gesturing to the longer lines of classical elegy.9 EBB thus recalled the form of the classical elegy, while asserting her own independence by departing from it. Critics have frequently emphasized the thematic and emotional resonance and details linking Hemans's, Landon's, and EBB's poems commemorating the deaths of poetesses in order to trace a lineage among women poets.10 Much suggests, however, that EBB typically invoked the content and forms of the male poetic tradition to distinguish her work from that of poetess predecessors.

The personal writings of popular nineteenth-century poet Felicia Hemans indicate her desire to alleviate social constraints on women to improve their education, yet her poetry’s female figures often seem overly attached to domesticity or lacking in emotional fortitude. This paper addresses ways in which a study of early modern female writers of history can inform Hemans scholarship, particularly by drawing on Megan Matchinske’s work on the ‘dying-tale’ in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613). Similarly, Hemans promotes the necessity of women acting to ensure successful political and personal endurance in ‘The Switzer’s Tale’. Furthermore, in the pedagogy of Records of Woman (1828), Hemans responds to the problem of visual dominance in art by adopting a multi-sensory approach to communication that relies especially on the auditory. This strategy takes part in a broader epistemic approach to history that criticises the reliability of memory and the transience of human bodies. Ultimately, Hemans suggests that transcendence occurs through the exercise of the human will, the ultimate representation of which is martyrdom.