Late Romantic Ekphrasis: Felicia Hemans, Leigh Hunt and the Return of the Visible

Abstract

This essay reconsiders the neglected interface between the romantic and Victorian periods in English literary history, the 1820s and 1830s. Focusing on the return of the visible in the ekphrastic work of two representative figures on the literary and cultural scene at the time, Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) and Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), it suggests that the popularization of ekphrasis in these years belies the notion of a sudden dearth of imaginative literature typically said to have occurred after Byron's death in 1824. In their ekphrastic writings Hemans and Hunt transform the high romanticism that precedes them as they highlight an otherwise marginalized desire for the visible at the core of high romanticism. In doing so, they anticipate the Victorian and modernist poetics that follow in their wake and on both counts occasion a reconsideration. 1

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