"Manly Sweetness": Katherine Philips among the Neoclassicals

Abstract

When Katherine Philips's posthumous Poems appeared in 1667, the volume included prefatory verses by Abraham Cowley celebrating her as England's esteemed Woman Laureat.l Few at the time dissented from Cowley's assessment, and many-some of them prominent writers -agreed.2 By now, however, as critic Harriette Andreadis remarked in 1989, the acclaim of [Philips's] contemporaries has . . . worn very thin: at best she has a poem or two in anthologies, representing a minor link between metaphysical and neoclassical poetry; at worst, critics disparage her work as florid, cajoling, or overly fluent.3 No one has yet adequately accounted for the decline in Philips's literary fortunes.4 When did this decline occur? What was the nature of her original reception? What were subsequent views of her work like?5 How did different senses of her poetry evolve? My essay attempts to answer these kinds of questions. I locate the decline in Philips's reputation in the eighteenth century, and I account for it by charting the interplay between changes in the reception of her poetry and changesespecially as these involve questions of gender-in neoclassical literary aesthetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6 In the course of my discussion, I identify three major phases in Philips's reception. The first spanned the 1650s and 1660s. The many writers who applauded Philips's works during these years did so in the gendered terms provided by contemporary neoclassical literary aesthetics, paying particular attention to what they described as the masculine strength and feminine sweetness of her verses. The second phase occurred in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

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