Rowe, Elizabeth | H. Bunker Wright (essay date 1945)
H. Bunker Wright (essay date 1945)
SOURCE: "Matthew Prior and Elizabeth Singer," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, January, 1945, pp. 71–82.
[In the following essay, Wright analyzes the relationship between Rowe and the poet Matthew Prior, based on a set of extant letters from Prior to Rowe.]
For several months in 1703 and 1704 Matthew Prior and Elizabeth Singer carried on a vivacious correspondence of which nothing has heretofore been known. Miss Singer's letters are not extant, but nine of Prior's have been preserved at Longleat,1 and these entertaining epistles reveal rather clearly the substance and tone of the letters to which they were answers. A study of this correspondence and its implications therefore helps to clarify the relationship between the two poets, a matter that has aroused the curiosity of Prior's biographers and has led to some unfounded conjecture.
Prior met Elizabeth Singer in the...
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