Forms of Engagement

Abstract

This book reveals previously unrecognized patterns of influence between women poets Katherine Philips, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish and their peers and predecessors including Donne, Jonson, Hobbes, Davenant, Cowley, and Milton. It shows how the aesthetic qualities of women’s poetry emerge from the culture in which they write: Margaret Cavendish develops a poetics of singularity, Katherine Philips of sociability, and Lucy Hutchinson of irony in a literary culture shared with men. While early modern women writers have to date been served more fully by historical and biographical than formalist analysis, this book sees the study of form as essential to an historical understanding of women writers. The premise of this book is that reading for form is reading for influence. By tracing formal influences on women poets we can understand more precisely their place in intellectual and poetic culture; by placing them in their literary culture we can better understand their aesthetic decisions and qualities. Hutchinson, Philips, and Cavendish were immersed in mid-seventeenth century cultural developments, from the birth of experimental philosophy, to the local and state politics of civil war and the rapid expansion of women’s print publication. For women poets, reworking poetic forms such as elegy, ode, epic, and couplet was a fundamental engagement with the culture in which they wrote. It is argued that by focusing on these interactions, rather than statements of exclusion and rejection, a formalist reading of these women can actually provide a more nuanced historical view of their participation in literary culture. Indeed, for Hutchinson, Philips, and Cavendish, engaging with other poets allowed them to be more original and innovative.

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