has him arrested and then chides him for returning to Earth. The Grand Inquisitor claims that Christ has no right to return and add anything to existing doctrine— once he left the Earth, the Church took over his work. The Grand Inquisitor sentences Christ to be burned the next day, and Christ’s only response throughout the lengthy scene is a silent kiss at the end. There are similarities between the two Grand Inquisitors. Both represent the belief that the intellect is superior to the emotions or the spirit. Voltaire’s Inquisitor represents the belief ironically because his decisions are reactionary, not thoughtful. Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor, however, states directly that in the conflict between intellect and faith, intellect is superior.

Another important similarity is that both Inquisitors cling to their power and use it immorally, and they have no tolerance for anyone who challenges them in any way. Voltaire’s Inquisitor has Pangloss hanged for declaring philosophical views the Inquisitor finds ridiculous. He justifies the hanging by labeling the philosophical claims heretical, but Pangloss is not a religious figure at all. Although his charge is to eradicate challenges to the church’s authority, Voltaire’s Inquisitor does not allow his personal authority to be challenged. He readily invokes his power to subject the captain to an auto-da-fé when the captain refuses to share his woman. Similarly, Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor refuses to be challenged and is so arrogant that he exerts his authority over Christ. Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor is a high-ranking person in the Catholic Church— a Cardinal—and his authority should rightly come from the Christ that the church worships. Yet when Christ appears, the Inquisitor responds with indignation. Without hesitation, he sentences Christ to be burned. Both Grand Inquisitors are powerful men. Because they often abuse their power, they also become extremely dangerous.

The differences between the two Grand Inquisitors reveal a great deal about the literary movements with which they are associated. Voltaire’s Inquisitor is cartoonish and ridiculous. This characterization is in keeping with the Enlightenment’s low estimation of the church and its clergy. He is a hypocrite who expects everyone else to follow the teachings of the Bible, while he thinks nothing of forcefully taking a mistress. His victims are foolish (like Dr. Pangloss), implying that the church has no real authority over anyone with intelligence. In contrast, Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor is a fully formed character who seems real to the reader. He exudes an air of cruelty and dispassion. This is typical of Dostoevsky’s writing, in which characters are realistic, and the reader is often given insight into the souls of his characters. Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor has a sharp mind, while Voltaire’s Inquisitor flippantly orders people to be killed. Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor engages in lengthy, profound philosophical and theological commentary, which gives him the power to persuade others to buy into his twisted perspective. His arrogance is so great that facing Christ, he condemns him with no concern for his own salvation. This scene is representative of Existentialism because it demonstrates the emphasis of existence over meaning. Christ exists to the Inquisitor, but because the Inquisitor strips away the meaning of Christ’s existence and appearance at this particular moment, Christ’s sovereignty means nothing to the Inquisitor.

The Enlightenment writers denounced the church for its restrictions and hypocrisy. Voltaire’s Grand Inquisitor personifies what the Enlightenment thinkers perceived as the worst of organized religion. Existential thinkers emphasized existence over meaning, and their belief that reason is ultimately inadequate to explain the great mysteries of life is depicted in Dostoevsky’s character of the Grand Inquisitor. The reader can see that his arguments and logic appear to be sound, but at the same time, it is clear that the Inquisitor has missed the mark. Both Inquisitors are creatures of the material world, but Voltaire suggests that the world can be better because his Inquisitor, for all his power and ability to frighten, is conquerable. He is ultimately defeated when Candide kills him. Voltaire’s presentation of him as foolish also allows the reader to see through him and realize that he is destructible. Dostoevsky’s existentialist Inquisitor, however, offers little hope to the reader. He has the power to kill divinity itself. This is where the existential view of possibilities in faith is relevant. If the reader believes that there is a world beyond the material one in which the Inquisitor is so powerful, then there is hope. This is very different from the Enlightenment emphasis on worldly happiness. To Enlightenment thinkers, if there is no hope in this world, there is no hope at all. These fundamental philosophical differences between the Enlightenment and Existentialism are represented in the parallel characters of the Grand Inquisitors. By comparing the brief appearance of Voltaire’s Inquisitor in Candide with the lengthy appearance of Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, the reader can easily distinguish the fundamental differences between Enlightenment and Existentialist ideas.

Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on the Enlightenment, in Literary Movements for Students, The Gale Group, 2003

Women’s poetry in the eighteenth century has been dealt with in terms of its political statement and its moral and social awareness. Much good work has been done in tracing themes and looking at social perspectives. Above all, some essential work has been done—the spade-work—of locating poets, finding their publications and manuscripts, and giving a coherent account of their individual lives. I can rest on the assurance that predecessors such as Roger Lonsdale and Donna Landry have given us a vision and knowledge that we didn’t have before, so I can take a slightly different tack.

In recent years also there has been much concern about ‘the Body’—it is still a fashionable topic. The Body has been poked and inspected, hung up for examination, and dissected by modern anatomists. Under all this treatment, ‘the Body’ has dwined and pined into an abstract conceptual framework, a notional entity. The Body, in short, has been done to death. I want to examine, but I need a better word than ‘examine’. I want to accompany, to go with, the sensuousness of poetry by women in the mid and late eighteenth century— from, and including, the work of Mary or Molly Leapor (b. 1722, d. 1746) to that of Ann Yearsley (b. 1752, d. 1806).

It is probably no accident that my ‘book-ends’ as it were, the two poets who act as temporal poles in this project, are both working-class female poets. Doubly disadvantaged, they were unlikely candidates for publication, and it speaks for some of the best aspects of the eighteenth century that they were able to be published at all. With all their obvious disadvantages, including the sensationseeking and condescension combined that promoted the work of ‘The Bristol Milkwoman’, Ann Yearsley, or ‘Lactilla’, these particular poets perhaps had some advantages. They had reason not to write an abstract ‘Poetry’ but to connect their own experiences with the common literary language, even while remodelling that language. We feel the immediacy in lines such as Leapor’s

—but now the dish-kettle began The boil and bubble with the foaming bran. The greasy apron round her hip she ties And to each plate the scalding clout applies. (‘Crumble Hall’)

The comedy is fulfilled not only with an exact observation, but with a respect for the process described. This might be taken to be mere reportage, but the same qualities are found in poets who are imagining new scenes—such as the transformations satirically imagined by Yearsley, in a Pythagorean world where the famous ancients turn up in vulgar urban roles of the present day:

Fair Julia sees Ovid, but passes him near, An old broom o’er her shoulder is thrown: (‘Addressed to Ignorance, Occasioned by a Gentleman’s desiring the Author never to assume a Knowledge of the Ancients’)

Objects are treated with clarity, and the senses are explicit. So, too, are the activities not only of daily working life, but of bodily life, the impulses and receptions that make for sense-experience, as well as the realm of movement. The women poets present us with a clearly sensuous world. The mind cannot divorce itself from the senses. This is a matter somewhat difficult of discussion because of our present disdain for the word ‘Sensibility’. And indeed ‘Sensibility’ will not serve my meaning here. The women poets are participants in that pan- European philosophical movement which both outlined modes of bodily response to external stimuli (discovering ‘nerves’ in the process), and delineated forms of social relations and psychosocial interaction. As writers such as Barker-Benfield (1992) have shown, the anxiety about the newly ‘feminized’ and nervous human entity could lead to a desire for greater control. Woman as the excessively sensitive person is too responsive—in contrast to the brutishly uncivil who are not sensible or sensitive enough. The novelists argue about these issues with some openness (culminating in Sense and Sensibility), but the poets of the eighteenth century—men as well as women—were trying to set up their own terms for discussing human experience and relationships to the world without getting altogether caught up in what some philosophers wanted to make of ‘Sensibility’.

The eighteenth century’s confident interest in sense impressions, fortified by the first part of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was balanced by some unease. After all, Locke’s concluding position is surprisingly close to that of Descartes. We have no contact with the real world out there, we are merely recipients of sense impressions always mediated by our own sensorium. The world is all in our minds. We look at snow, we think, but there’s a sense in which we do not see it—we only ‘see’ the impression in our mental equipment. This sense of being locked into a cell of the self can be particularly disturbing. English poets of the eighteenth century thus went out of their way to counteract such a potential isolation in writing a poetry that is far more concrete and sensuous, less abstract, than that of either their predecessors (the Metaphysical and Baroque writers) or their successors (the Romantics). It is arguable—I would certainly argue it—that eighteenth-century poetry is the most directly sensuous poetry England has ever had. The reference to the impact of self and object, the re-creation of the fascinating and insistent world of particulars, can be found in the poetry of Swift of course, and over and over again, as in ‘A Description of the Morning’:

Now Moll had whirl’d her Mop with dext’rous Airs, Prepar’d to Scrub the Entry and the Stairs. The Youth with Broomy Stumps began to trace The Kennel-Edge, where Wheels had worn the Place. The Smallcoal-Man was heard with Cadence deep, Till drown’d in Shriller Notes of Chimney-Sweep.

We are made to observe what the refined reader usually overlooks, or finds boring. We are participants momentarily in the activity of the working people, and close enough to observe the ‘Broomy Stumps’ and the traces of wheels.

I think Pope was partly inspired by Swift to amplify the observation of common things in his own poetry; although, unlike Swift, Pope is a poet with pretensions to the ‘grand style’, he does keep a close watch on diurnal realities. He too can cause the snort of disgust at confronting us with the evocation of the sensation of disgust:

To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames (Dunciad)

Pope is more hierarchical than Swift in his fine evocations of sensory experiences. Swift, arguably the strongest satirist, strikes one is curiously more broad-minded, that is, less inclined towards hierarchical arrangements of experience. I have written elsewhere of Swift’s relation to the women poets, but I have been freshly struck by it, when, for instance, coming upon an open imitation of Swift’s ‘Morning’ in Mary Robinson’s ‘London’s Summer Morning’ (written c. 1794, published 1804, according to Lonsdale):

Who has not waked to list the busy sounds Of summer’s morning, in the sultry smoke Of noisy London? On the pavement hot The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face And tattered covering, shrilly bawls his trade, Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell Proclaims the dustman’s office; while the street Is lost in clouds impervious. Now begins The din of hackney-coaches, waggons, carts; While tinmen’s shops, and noisy trunk-makers, Knife-grinders, coopers, squeaking cork-cutters, Fruit-barrows, and the hunger-giving cries Of vegetable-vendors, fill the air. . . . At the private door The ruddy housemaid twirls the busy mop, Annoying the smart ‘prentice, or neat girl, Tripping with band-box lightly. Now the sun Darts burning splendour on the glittering pane, Save where the canvas awning throws a shade On the gay merchandise. Now, spruce and trim, In shops (where beauty smiles with industry) Sits the smart damsel; while the passenger Peeps through the window, watching every charm. Now pastry dainties catch the eye minute Of humming insects, while the limy snare Waits to enthrall them. . .

Pope’s excuse for regarding low-life objects and describing—or evoking—sense reactions to them is largely satiric. This is by no means always the case with Swift, and seldom truly the case with women poets. Mary Robinson (‘Perdita’), once mistress of the prince Regent, gives as it were a townscape secularized, a new paysage non moralisé. We feel the fullness of life, the cacophony, without being called on to register some hierarchical forms of disapproval or desire to reorder. There is such a superabundance of detail that we may miss the subtle connection between ‘merchandise’ and the ‘smart damsel’, the milliner or seamstress seated in the shop window, and between ‘damsel’ and ‘pastry dainties’. Shopowners (including female milliners) did put the prettiest girls to work in the window with the design of attracting customers, especially males—a matter gone into in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer. The displayed pastries are displayed for appetite, like the girls. But the sly observation is not followed into overt moralizing.

Acknowledged throughout Robinson’s poem is the multiple connectedness, the omnipresence of consumerism. The speaker poet, in the persona of the woman who awakens to the growing noise and activity of the day, is not given a position of peculiar privilege from which to look down and moralize. For one thing, she is part of the consuming need and the need to consume. This is what differentiates Robinson’s narrator—persona from Swift’s in his ‘Morning’. Swift’s speaker just sees all these phenomena. Robinson draws us in further into reaction and response. The mop is not only twirled, again, its whirling drops affect others unpleasantly. One of the most startling touches is her invented compound adjective ‘hunger-giving’. Other writers (not to mention graphic artists and musicians) had illustrated the ‘Cries of London’, a minor motif in entertainment since at least the time of Purcell.

But the customary description invites us to look on in amusement, to hear with detachment, the criers and their cries. Robinson’s participle adjective participates in an immediate response which is not immune to the activity of the advertisement. ‘The hunger-giving cries/Of vegetable vendors’— the phrase acknowledges that hunger is roused, and is there to be roused, in all—including the speaker herself. We are not free to withdraw from the cycle of consuming. That gut reaction, that urgent sensory need, linked with the pleasure of taste, connects us with the flies, who are also gazers with the ‘eye minute’ upon the pastry ‘dainties’—which become all the stickier in their immediate connection with the flypaper, the ‘limy snare’ waiting to enthrall the little bugs. ‘Enthrall’ is usually a grand word, a romantic and literary word—this use returns it to its origins in ideas of enslavement, entrapment, imprisonment and power.

Robinson shows here an acute awareness of the effects and nature of heat; a surrounding atmosphere of urban warmth lessens our dependence on vision as primary sense. The female poets of the eighteenth century customarily show an awareness of graduations of heat and of cold—and of what might be called the pressure of environmental temperature or atmosphere. So it is with Mary Leapor as ‘Mira’, describing her birthday under the sign of Pisces:

‘Twas when the flocks on slabby hillocks lie, And the cold Fishes rule the wat’ry sky: (‘An Epistle to a Lady’)

The ‘slabby hillocks’ are cool, damp and muddy—a sense of discomfort is, as it were, transferred to, and also acknowledged in, the wordless sheep, the flocks who are waiting out the less than pleasing late winter—early spring of an ungracious countryside. Sky and earth, unhierarchically, are alike damp and cool. Such lines draw on a sense of feeling not usually on our minds when we talk about the ‘sense of touch’—a phrase that serves us well when, for instance, dealing with a poet’s description of the down of a peach. We do not have only the particular pointed sensation of voluntary touch where we poke or stroke another object, but general senses of ‘touch’, as with our skin’s relation to the circumambient atmosphere. Our sensual circumstances are known to be shared with other creatures—like the flocks in Leapor’s birthday description, or the cow and the flocks in Yearsley’s invocation of harsh winter:

The nymph, indifferent, mourns the freezing sky; Alike insensible to soft desire, She asks no warmth but from the kitchen fire. Love seeks a milder zone; half sunk in snow, LACTILLA, shivering, tends her fav’rite cow; The bleating flocks now ask the bounteous hand, And crystal streams in frozen fetters stand. (‘Clifton Hill’)

The cold can quell sexual desire in woman— an astonishing observation in Yearsley’s piece, as with it comes the assumption that a woman should naturally have a libido, and that this is a temporary dis-location of sexual energy, transferred to the cause of survival. Yet love of a kind does survive, because shivering Lactilla tends her ‘fav’rite cow’, and the cow remains a recipient of particular and individual favour even in the numbing cold. Human agency is of importance in helping the domestic animals in a crisis of sensation that still asks for activity—the ‘bounteous hand’ must move towards the ‘bleating flocks’ even while the streams are fettered and stand still, truly transformed into the conventional crystal. Sky, earth, and water share the cold, and there is no release into hierarchy of elements. The hierarchy subtly dismissed in an equation of sky and earth is also overthrown in the repeated emphasis in Yearsley’s poem on the fellow-suffering of animals, and their importance. Here I think I have a new motif to discuss with you—and this is something that I have only just discovered myself in women’s poetry of the eighteenth century.

I had intended to deal at large with sensuousness in general, and in particular with instances of sensuous evocation in women’s poetry. I would have rambled through the jumble of Crumble Hall with Mary Leapor, alluded to champagne and chicken in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. I should have pointed to instances of the ability to use an unusual image, as Anna Seward does with her green star in ‘The Anniversary’:

O! hast thou seen the star of eve on high, Through the soft dusk of summer’s balmy sky Shed its green light, and in the glassy stream Eye the mild reflex of its trembling beam?

I would also have dwelt on the use of unusual images of taste and smell, and comic pungent images like Anna Seward’s description of the Boston Tea Party:

When Boston, with indignant thought, Saw poison in the perfum’d draught, And caus’d her troubled bay to be But one vast bowl of bitter Tea; (‘Verses inviting Mrs. C—to Tea on a public Fast- Day, during the American War’)

I should have done all this and more. . . But my attention was forcibly caught by something I had not fully seen, and certainly had not explored before, in dealing with women’s writing and with eighteenth-century poetry. My topic is largely the relation of human to animal in poetic works by eighteenth-century women. These poets’ exploration of sensuousness rests on a rediscovery and a reassertion of human relation to animal, bird, insect. The senses are validated in a new way through what I shall call (for short) the ‘Pythagorean theme’. It has many important implications, and an understanding of it will illuminate women’s poetry of the eighteenth century and later.

The Pythagorean Theme
In The Daring Muse I have already discussed Ann Yearsley’s poem ‘Addressed to Ignorance’, which uses the conceit of Pythagorean metampsychosis to invent a comic world where ancient characters of history and legend turn up in vulgar and prosaic modern guises. The significance of this comic reversal lies in its rebuke to the ‘Gentleman’ who told Yearsley that as a poor woman she had no right ‘to assume a knowledge of the Ancients’. Yearsley rebukes him, borrowing a set of ideas from the ‘ancients’: she shows that she can envisage a cosmos without stable hierarchies, in which the class differences (along with national and other differences) that seem so solid to ‘the Gentleman’ don’t count for much:

Here’s Trojan, Athenian, Greek, Frenchman and I, Heav’n knows what I was long ago: No matter, thus shielded, this age I defy, And the next cannot hurt me, I know.

As I noted then, ‘Her poem is a declaration of human equality.’ What I did not realize then is the fact that there is a tradition (if we can call it by so grand a word), a history, of women’s use of the Pythagorean idea that Yearsley uses in ‘To Ignorance’ to deal with human equality. But the women poets more often evoke the Pythagorean idea in relating human life to animal life. Yearsley herself does this in ‘Clifton Hill’. She describes, as we have noted above, the effects of extreme cold on the nymph, Lactilla, the cow, the flocks. She goes from human to animal to birds in noting reactions to the cold, and kinship among those who suffer from it. But her ensuing description of the robin moves into the description of the murderous male with the gun, whose response to other creatures is a delight in the powers of destruction:

The beauteous red-breast, tender in her frame Whose murder marks the fool with treble shame, Near the low cottage door, in pensive mood, Complains and mourns her brothers of the wood Her song oft waked the soul to tender joys, All but his restless soul whose gun destroys;

Yearsley imagines a fitting vengeance:

For this, rough down, long pains on thee shall wait, And freezing want avenge their hapless fate; For these fell murders mayst thou change thy kind, In outward form as savage as in mind; Go be a bear of Pythagorean name, From man distinguished by thy hideous frame. (‘Clifton Hill (Written in January 1785)’)

An earlier female poet had used the Pythagorean idea. Anna Seward treats the motif several times, and it may be that Yearsley had come upon some of the poems that circulated in manuscript long before Seward’s works were posthumously published, edited (at her request) by Walter Scott.

Like the other female poets in my discussion, Seward counts herself a Christian, but a Christian often vexed at what man made pronouncements and social structures and controls have made of religion. Most of these writers would have warmly assented to Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s statement in her poem ‘To the Poor’, which declares that the rich and powerful not only make the present life of the poor painfully wretched, but seek to extend their own controlling image to God and the hereafter. The threats that the rich extend to the poor in the name of religion are something the poor have the God-given right to dismiss:

Safe in the bosom of that love repose By whom the sun gives light, the ocean flows, Prepare to meet a father undismayed, Nor fear the God whom priests and kings have made. (‘To the Poor’)

Man-made laws and concepts not only set up great barriers between human beings, but also create an impassable divide between the human and the other living creatures of this earth—a divide that is used to justify those other intra-human divisions, in terms like ‘brutish’, and so on. To turn the human into animal, or relate a man strongly to animal or insect life, is a terrific insult, as it is repeatedly in Pope’s Dunciad:

Maggots half-form’d in rhyme exactly meet nd learn to crawl upon poetic feet.

How here he sipp’d, how there he plunder’d snug And suck’d all o’er, like an industrious Bug.

As when a dab-chick waddles thro’ the copse On feet and wings, and flies, and wades, and hops; So lab’ring on . . . . . . Bernard rows his state.

To connect man and animal (or bird or insect) is to breed monsters, as bad poets do. Fear of the monstrous curdles much Augustan thought and literature. The reign of Reason seemed to depend on getting rid of ‘monsters’ of all kinds, but the notion was there at the philosophical centre. Locke in the Essay admits that Nature is not interested in clear lines between species, which are, like the ‘species’ themselves, an invention of the human mind. This subversion of Aristotle is a scandal that the eighteenth century partly succeeds in hushing up, but fear of the monstrous may be found everywhere, including a sense of horror at the approach of categories of species to each other.

I would argue that the women writers do not share this fear or horror, and that they approach the matter differently. Theologically, they are antignostic in defence of creation and of matter. They are not reluctant to explore the activities of sensing and the sensed world as much more immediate (both as activity and object) than Locke allows. Locke emphasizes ‘Human Understand ing’: the women want to see what we have in common with other life in a created world. There is a vindication of the senses and of that which actively senses. The Pythagorean theme, along with the strong interest in animals, birds and insects generally found in women’s poetry, especially in this period, permits investigations and statements counter to a dangerously prevalent reduction of everything to the life of Mind—the proud Mind. The Pythagorean idea offers a philosophical theme opposed to much contemporary philosophy, but its stance is officially seen as so unquestionably out of the question as to arouse no very indignant reaction. The ‘Pythagoreanism’ we encounter in the women’s writing is not, indeed, the classic Pythagorean ladder of progress towards purification. The women do not in the least want to emphasize a teleological objection of purity, freedom from the senses. Rather, they are fascinated by the imaginative idea that a conscious entity might have been a bird in the last incarnation and may be a beast in the next. A relatively early poem by Anna Seward, ‘Ode on the Pythagorean System’, picks up the theme in grand style, if a trifle gingerly. Seward is aware that the Pythagorean system of reincarnation conflicts with the Christian scheme, but she argues that there is a ‘sacred sense’ in the Pythagorean system, and a certain justice to the ‘Spirit warm’ has its appeal. Let persons express their moral nature by taking animal form in a new birth:

Then while revenge meets his congenial lot, And howls the tiger of the desert plain; While sensual Love burns in the odious Goat, And in the Hog the Glutton feasts again;

For her part, Seward says, choosing the vegetable role, she would like to come back as a myrtle tended by her friend Laura. Except for its ending, this ‘Ode’ is conventional in its treatment of Pythagoreanism—faulty human beings become imprisoned in bestial expressive forms as punishment. But Seward won’t leave it at that. She has a more unorthodox poem later which wrestles with the Biblical statement regarding ‘The beasts that perish’; Seward attributes complacent judgement to ‘proud Man . . . as he were doom’d alone/To meet, for guiltless pains, supreme reward’. If, she argues, animals are not to have a life after death, that would meet the terms of Divine Justice only if their lives on earth had been happy, and they had been allowed to fulfil their animal nature while alive. But this often does not happen, because of man’s cruelty:

Alas! the dumb defenceless numbers, found The wretched subjects of a tyrant’s sway, Who hourly feel his unresisted wound, And hungry pine through many a weary day;

Or those, of lot more barbarously severe, Who strain their weak, lame limbs beneath the load Their fainting strength is basely doom’d to bear, While smites the lash, the steely torments goad;

Here we feel the eighteenth-century’s sensory identification with pain, as the speaker moves towards close identification with a suffering sentient creature.

Has GOD decreed this helpless, suffering train Shall groaning yield the vital breath he gave, Unrecompensed for years of want, and pain, And close on them the portals of the grave? (‘On the Future Existence of Brutes’,)

No, Seward argues, God will surely do better than that. There must be some ‘Expiatory Plan’, or God is not just. The tenor of this poem is almost entirely to close the gap between Human and Brute. The Dog, she says, illustrates the animal power of emotional refinement, intelligence, susceptibility to education, and moral virtue. Why imagine that the Dog has no afterlife?

Ah, wretch ingrate, to liberal hope unknown! Does pride encrust thee with so dark a leaven, To deem this spirit, purer than thine own, Sinks, while thou soarest to the light of Heaven!

Thinking about the fate of animals after death occupies a fair amount of Seward’s time. In ‘An Old Cat’s Dying Soliloquy’ she combines the comic with her questioning of human notions of the afterlife. The old cat knows she is near her end:

Fate of eight lives the forfeit gasp obtains, And e’en the ninth creeps languid through my veins.

But the cat is piously sure she has much to which to look forward:

Much sure of good the future has in store, When on my master’s hearth I bask no more, In those blest climes, where fishes oft forsake The winding and the glassy lake; There, as our silent-footed race behold The crimson spots and fins of lucid gold, Venturing without the shielding waves to play, They gasp on shelving banks, our easy prey; While birds unwinged hop careless o’er the ground, And the plump mouse incessant trots around, Near wells of cream that mortals never skim, Warm marum creeping round their shallow brim; Where green valerian tufts, luxuriant spread, Cleanse the sleek hide and form the fragrant bed. (‘An Old Cat’s Dying Soliloquy’)

Now, it was certainly a truism that women poets think about pet birds and animals. Satire on women’s involvement with their pets is fairly easy to find in this period. Richardson had a crack at women poets in his Sir Charles Grandison. Early in her sojourn in London, the heroine Harriet Byron meets a young lady, Miss Darlington, with ‘a pretty taste in poetry’, who is prevailed upon to show three of her performances.

The third was on the death of a favourite Linet [sic]; a little too pathetic for the occasion; since were Miss Darlington to have lost her best and dearest friend, I imagine that she had in this piece, which is pretty long, exhausted the subject; and must borrow from it some of the images which she introduces to heighten her distress from the loss of the little songster.

Richardson indicates that women in general waste their emotion upon their pets, and that women poets may be expected to waste adjectives and images upon such a trite subject as well. As women have so little to occupy their minds, they will treat the mere death of a pet linnet as a major event. Richardson restores the hierarchies that female poets tend to rumple. Human beings must be kept distinct from birds. One should be able to distinguish with absolute clarity the distress caused by the death of a human friend from the feeling of loss relating to a mere animal.

The tendency of women to identify self and emotion with animal or bird is clearly marked, certainly from the time of Ann Finch. Perhaps partly inspired by her married surname, Finch identifies herself with a bird, most powerfully in one of her best poems ‘The Bird in the Arras’, where the bird exhibits panic, bewilderment, wild desire. In her best-known poem, ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’, Finch notices the relaxation and freedom of both vegetable and animal life as the sun sets:

When freshen’d Grass now bears itself upright, And makes cool Banks to pleasing Rest invite.

Vision ceases to be so important, and creatures are known and know each other in darkness through various senses:

When the loos’d Horse, now as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through th’adjoining Meads, Whose stealing Pace, and lengthened Shade we fear, Till torn-up Forage in his Teeth we hear;

The horse is identified not by vision (which creates an illusory monster) but by sound. The change in emphasis of sense reliance and sense instruction creates a connection between the human hearer’s sense of the horse chomping on grass, and the horse’s own touch-and-taste sense of the grass between its teeth. This is a time of pleasure, a senseholiday from the ruling power of sunlight and the obsession with sight.

Their shortlived Jubilee the Creatures keep, Which but endures while Tyrant-Man do’s sleep: When a sedate Content the Spirit feels And no fierce Light disturbs, while it reveals

The sunlight of Enlightenment, of reason, is associated with the oppression of man’s rule and the social order. While ‘Tyrant-Man’ here may be read as the tyrant human, the phrase obviously refers to the tyrant male. In the night season, in their ramble together, Ann Finch and the Lady Salusbury are at one with the plants and animals. In this highly sensuous poem, sense life comes to full life in the presence of animals who are briefly allowed to have their full sensory life not restricted, censured, surveyed or used. The female companions also have a ‘shortliv’d Jubilee’ of sense pleasure, and expansion, so that all the senses (touch, smell, hearing) may be used harmoniously, not governed hierarchically by vision nor held in place by convention.

Women have been traditionally held to be the larger partaker in the animal nature. Man is spirit, man is mind. Woman is animal, if a higher animal. Richardson’s hero Sir Charles Grandison explains it all, as Enlightenment philosopher. Nature clearly makes a difference in qualities such as courage between male and female in the animal kingdom: ‘The surly bull, the meek, the beneficent cow, for one instance?’. And, allowing that human souls may be equal, ‘yet the very design of the different machines in which they are inclosed, is to superinduce a temporary difference on their original equality; a difference adapted to the different purposes for which they are designed by Providence in the present transitory state.’ Women have to bear children and give suck—so obviously that makes them inferior in this life. Such an assumption rests on the assumption that the ‘animal’ functions, like those of the meek cow, take over the greater portion of a woman’s personality and her life. And that further rests on the assumption that the ‘animal’ functions and attributes can be clearly distinguished from the ‘human’. Eighteenth-century women poets, it is clear, look upon animals in a manner very different from the way Richardson and his Sir Charles look upon them. Sir Charles’s world is one of clear boundaries, strong divisions, clear designs. There should not be effeminate men and masculine women. The line between man and woman, as between human and animal, must be held. Within Richardson’s novels, the female characters do maintain something of the women’s dialogue, as their view of animal life differs in part from that of Sir Charles’—Charlotte compares herself and her husband to blackbirds with eggs to hatch. But that sort of play is not appropriate to Sir Charles, who as governing man must hold the line clearly.

It can be seen that the women poets enjoy playing with those boundaries that Sir Charles is at such pains to delineate. They defiantly adopt the sensibility of animals, team up, as it were with animals against ‘Tyrant-Man’. Seward’s insight into the cruelty to ‘the wretched subjects of a tyrant’s sway’ rests partly on that of Finch before her. She too is willing to assume (for play, for seriousness) the sensations of the animal creature. This might be called ‘poetic Pythagoreanism’—the poet assumes the senses of an animal, thus transforming herself into the creature in a temporary transmogrification. The entrance into animal sensation is a kind of licence to give the sensory life its full due; that sensory life often denied in the cultural life of regulations and ideas.

Men are sometimes imagined (as in Yearsley’s ‘Clifton Hill’) as being punished in a ‘Pythagorean’ manner by being made perforce to enter that animal nature that they have disdained. That would be a punishment because men think it so; they have this hectic urge to insist on their totally mental mode of being, their totally spiritual destiny. But the women poets show themselves as the true Pythagoreans, able to enter into the sensual life of animals—or even plants, as when Seward wishes to be a myrtle; to be a plant loved by a woman would be better than honour done her having her brows bound with myrtle. In ‘An Old Cat’s Dying Soliloquy’ Seward makes us take comic pleasure in imagining the Elysium or Paradise of a cat— sharing sensations with the cat, in an access of new sensuousness. We are free to indulge it because it is partly parodic, but once we do indulge it, we cannot maintain the aloofness of parody. The poem is ‘parodic’ of human serious descriptions of forms of heaven seriously desired. It is thus an Enlightenment poem in that it implicitly questions the religious conventions, and shows how they are related to cultural expectations. But in this case the cultural difference (between cats and ourselves) is so extreme, and so hitherto unthought-of, that we can enjoy the play upon the idea of heaven without serious religious or moral twinges. What seems most striking to me about the ‘Old Cat’ poem is its immediacy. The poem obviously and overtly owes something to Gray’s Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes (published in 1748). It owes something—not too much. Gray’s poem is a mock-heroic fable. The cat is just an object; we are to laugh at the beast and her fate, even while we may reject the too-placid moral on vanity and avarice. Gray’s Selima is almost entirely an object of sight. ‘Her coat, that with the tortoise vies / Her ears of jet and emerald eyes’ are not her own description of herself. We see the goldfish too:

Still had she gaz’d; but ‘midst the tide Two angel forms were seen to glide, The genii of the stream: Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue Thro’ richest purple to the view Betray’d a golden gleam.

This is almost seeing from the cat’s-eye view— but not really: ‘angel’ and ‘Genii’ carry no allusions to cat vocabulary. And the Popean touches regarding the fishes’ colour carry us further into the realm of the literary and away from the cat—if the beginning of this stanza proposes the cat Selima as observer, by the end we have lost her. She remains fenced in by an Aesopic objectivity.

The descriptions of the fish in Seward’s poem do remind us of Gray and, like Gray, Seward adapts the kind of language used in Pope:

There, as our silent-footed race behold The crimson spots and fins of lucid gold.

But this is not, as it were, the main event. The by now conventionalized fish become much more what a cat would want—as they leave the water voluntarily. And they are overtaken by a host of other similarly amiable and catchable prey—products of a cat’s imagination, not fitting any human aesthetic (in marked contrast to the fish): While birds unwinged hop careless o’er the ground, And the plump mouse incessant trots around.

The wells of cream offer another kind of sensory experience, and the piling up of sensuousness is achieved through the invocation of smell and touch simultaneously (and right after taste) in the ‘Warm marum’ (marjoram) and green valerian tufts. Yes, a cat’s heaven would have cream, herbs and certainly catnip. We do not end the poem with these sensuous images so lovely to the cat. The last note is an elegiac regret at parting. Even in heaven she may miss her home and her human friend and the life she knew:

O’er marum borders and valerian bed Thy Selima shall bend her moping head, Sigh that no more she climbs, with grateful glee Thy downy sofa and thy cradling knee;

The cat proves capable of loyalty and affection, her virtues thus making her implicitly worthy of cat heaven—or of human heaven too. There is a comic reversal, as Seward’s Selima faces death in a style very unlike that of Gray’s greedy and accident- prone Selima. Seward’s Selima has conscious dignity and religious hope. The greater reversal lies in the cat’s regret that her owner cannot be with her. Owners of animals in Christian (and other) cultures often express regret that their pets cannot be with them in an orthodox afterlife— here the tables are turned. And indeed, what would a human do with plump mice, wells of cream, and tufts of catnip? But the poem shows what arrogance we exhibit when we assume that there is a heaven fit for human purposes to which animals are not allowed. The sharing (imaginatively and comically) of the cat’s sensations and desires is a liberation into a range of sense experience, and an expression of confidence in the value of what we term the ‘animal’ nature.

When women poets are being most serious about the importance of the animal nature, they often disguise the seriousness in some form of comedy that can induce us to participate in the Pythagorean festival of throwing off our usual identities and expectations. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ is a poem in the persona of the mouse that has been caught in a trap and awaits the experimentation of Dr Priestley. The poem was, naturally enough, taken up as a statement against animal experimentations, and Barbauld, not wishing to appear unscientific, pointed out that ‘the poor animal would have suffered more as the victim of domestic economy, than of philosophic curiosity.’ In her later explanation Barbauld claimed that all she meant was to express ‘the petition of mercy against justice’—but that is not what the poem says, for of course from the mouse’s point of view what is being done to him is an ex- treme case of injustice—it is arbitrary tyrannical cruelty. The mouse uses contemporary political language to make its point:

Oh¡ hear a pensive prisoner’s prayer, For liberty that sighs; And never let thine heart be shut Against the wretch’s cries.

For here forlorn and sad I sit, Within the wiry grate; And tremble at th’ approaching morn, Which brings impending fate.

If e’er thy breast with freedom glow’d, And spurn’d a tyrant’s chain, Let not thy strong oppressive force A free-born mouse detain. (‘The Mouse’s Petition’)

From the language of political rights, the mouse turns to the rights of nature, which are physical rights. The great natural law is the right to exist.

The well taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives.

Not only should there be compassion, but empathy. To see the world with an equal eye is to feel the claims of all life. From this philosophical point there is but a short step to the Pythagorean theme, and the mouse takes it:

If mind, as ancient sages taught, A never dying flame, Still shifts through matter’s varying forms, In every form the same,

Beware, lest in the worm you crush A brother’s soul you find; And tremble lest thy luckless hand Dislodge a kindred mind.

This is a moral-philosophical and even religious point of view remote from Christianity but closely resembling Jainism, and certain branches of Buddhism. It may well be that our poets were affected, however indirectly, by the new contact with India brought about by colonial expansion in the eighteenth century. But the mouse also entertains the Epicurean idea that there is no life after death— that the bodily life of this existence is our all in all:

Or, if this transient gleam of day Be all of life we share, Let pity plead within thy breast That little all to spare.

Ostensibly the mouse is talking only of the annihilation in death of mere animals. But by this point there is no felt difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’—all is subsumed as ‘we’, so the possibility of ‘one transient gleam of day’ allotted to all, man and animal, as the only portion of their existence, is truly included. It scarcely matters, however, which group will perish eternally and which only temporarily—the urgency is so pressing, the life of here and now so immediate. It is hard not to see within this petition a plea for all sense-life, and for the powers of sensing as of the utmost importance, worthy of religious respect. The animal life of ‘mere’ sensuousness, of sense perception, is the real life. That modern point of view is of course going to clash with Priestley’s modern point of view that regards animals as implements in technological expansion. Priestley contradicts nature in deliberately and slowly taking from nature’s commoners the vital air. Breathing itself becomes one of the first great primary sensations and sensepleasures as soon as its cutting-off is threatened.

Barbauld’s very popular poem is highly efficacious as verse—if not in stopping experimentation on animals. It is perhaps, however, slightly marred by a hint of self-conscious cuteness. Barbauld’s best poem on animal life and animal claims is ‘The Caterpillar’. The speaker is the human woman who admits without apology that she has been rasing hundreds of cocoons and caterpillars from the orchard tree. But then she looks at one caterpillar on her finger, and cannot kill it:

No, helpless thing, I cannot harm thee now; Depart in peace, thy little life is safe, For I have scanned thy form with curious eye, Noted the silver line that streaks thy back, The azure and the orange that divide Thy velvet sides; thee, houseless wanderer, My garment has enfolded, and my arm Felt the light pressure of thy hairy feet; Thou hast curled round my finger; from its tip Precipitous descent¡ with stretched out neck, Bending thy head in airy vacancy, This way and that, inquiring, thou hast seemed To ask protection; now, I cannot kill thee.

The caterpillar does not speak in a fabulous manner, but its presence is insisted on. It becomes more real and more active as the speaker progresses. The description of the appearance of the caterpillar is striking in its minute detail. We clarify the silver line, distinguish the azure and the orange.

Such detail combines the scientific interests of the period with its poetic interests. One finds details like this in Thomson’s Seasons, and Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (1789) is of course full of such detail. Darwin may himself have been influenced by Seward, the earlier poet; she knows and alludes to him, and his biology. His writing while in progress may have influenced her in turn; presumably his work was an influence on Barbauld’s later work. We sometimes forget that the 1790s saw the first shoots of an evolutionary hypothesis which was to be formalized and turn into something else after the work of the later Darwin in the next century. Barbauld’s description of how the caterpillar looks is still in keeping with the lines of what we may call ‘male poetry’. But the continuation in intimate physical connection with the caterpillar strikes me as something that one would find only in female poetry—of any period. A subtle use of the Pythagorean motif whereby man and animal are equalized can be recognized in the equalizing of human and insect. ‘My arm/Felt the light pressure of thy hairy feet’—‘arm’ and ‘feet’ are both words used of the human body. The woman and the caterpillar begin to share a body, as it were, to trade bodily sensations. The caterpillar is sensing the woman’s hand while she senses him. If she is looking at it, so the caterpillar too is looking about. The individual caterpillar becomes a highly sensuous object, not only in its coloration (that kind of sensuous appeal can be captured in glass cases) but in the life that is in it that makes it an agent with impact on the world—the ‘light pressure’ of its ‘hairy feet’. Both alien and homely, the caterpillar has the utmost reality. Its felt immediacy causes the woman to see it in a kind of religious sensation:

Making me feel and clearly recognize Thine individual existence, life, And fellowship of sense with all that breathes

To recognize ones own sensuous power, to write sensuously, should entail breaking through to ‘the fellowship of sense’.

The pleasure that we might find in this moral is shadowed and complicated by the end of the poem. The woman speaker compares her sparing of the caterpillar in her general ‘persecuting zeal’ against caterpillars to the act of a soldier who in the midst of war urges on ‘the work of death and carnage’, but spares one enemy:

Yet should one A single sufferer from the field escaped, Panting and pale, and bleeding at his feet, Lift his imploring eyes—the hero weeps He is grown human, and capricious Pity, Which would not stir for thousands, melts for one With sympathy spontaneous— This not Virtue Yet ’tis the weakness of a virtuous mind. (‘Caterpillar’)

We are here at the end in a very male world of ruthless violence, so consistent that the act of mercy is felt as an anomaly, a whim, a weakness that cannot be described as ‘Virtue’, but is merely a reflex in favour of individuality. The speaker’s own act becomes impossible to categorize. She is not a moral example. There seems no sure way back to ‘humanity’, save to take the unthinkable road of respecting all life—which might doom her apple tree, but would also put an end to the inhumanity of war. The ‘fellowship of sense’ opens a way to something more than a sentimental moment. This telling phrase ‘fellowship of sense’ points towards a feeling or intuition of what might be called ‘one flesh’ in a sense different from that of the Bible or the Prayer Book’s marriage service. The caterpillar is like the human victim—one flesh with us in the ‘fellowship of sense’. We have the frustrating glimpse of alternatives that cannot be clearly set out. Barbauld refuses to sentimentalize herself or her sparing of the creature. The momentary relation between herself and that creature, however, is a moment of sensory pleasure, and the living with the caterpillar, following its senses too, offers a route of escape from limitation.

What I have called the ‘Pythagorean theme’ in eighteenth-century poetry is a trope (or set of tropes) emphasizing the value of the animal existence, the body’s own capacities and energies, the holy vitality of the senses. Eighteenth-century women poets keep trying to find ways to express the respect that should be given to the animal and sensory nature. Like Ann Finch in her ‘Nocturnal Reverie’, they provide moments of escape from a world where everything is known, the hierarchies are clearly measured, and where the senses (like woman herself) occupy a low place, along with mere ‘brutishness’. When I find these eighteenthcentury women poets dealing with the relation to animals, they are always trying to express some way of acknowledging equality, and relationship. The ‘Pythagorean’ poems (and now I know my word has become a kind of shortland) question assumptions about spiritual and moral life, and try to point to other responsibilities. In doing this, the poets exhibit great versatility, and powers not only of sensory description but also of conceptual re-positioning. Some male poets heard them, as well as the other women poets who followed them; I see the influence of these writers on Blake, for example, and certainly on Cowper, who perhaps took aboard more than any other male poetic writer what the women were saying. Yet in Cowper there is, it seems to me, always still that distance between animal and man that is a distance between subject and object—when he describes his hares, for instance. The women poets seem to be bent on breaking down that barrier between subject and object, between ‘Man’ and animal which is a barrier parallel to the Lockean barrier betwixt mind and world.

The Fairy Way of Writing
There is another trope or device that I would wish to emphasize, partly because it provides a contrast to the Pythagorean motif, a contrast and complement within the women’s poetry. Like writing about animals and birds, this subject lends itself to ridicule and dismissal. Women poets often write about elves and fairies. Some of them got quite good at it. Percy told Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi that in her (unacted) verse drama The Two Fountains she had written better about fairies than anyone since Shakespeare. This was not a dubious distinction in Percy’s eyes, though it might be to others. Women repeatedly chose to deal with elves and fairies partly because, like the animals, these (imaginary) beings offer a reflecting screen where sensation and reflection can be played with, away from the world of man-made regulations and cultural pressures. Moreover, fairies have the distinct advantage over animals—as over humans—that they do not know death. Even more remarkable, they do not know pain; emotional suffering is not part of their scheme of life.

Fairies do not have to be moral—a great convenience, and an enviable one to women, who are always being told they must be moral, chaste and very careful, and should always put other people first. Fairies do none of these things. Frances Greville puts the case most clearly in her ‘Prayer for Indifference’ of 1759. She asks Oberon to find her a magic balm that will render her unloving and uncaring. The poem is really about the emotional torment of a wife who is not loved by her husband. The fairy power would remove from her the acuteness of emotion which is like veritable sensation. As with physical sensation, pain is stronger than pleasure:

Far as distress the soul can wound, ‘Tis pain in each degree; Bliss goes but to a certain bound, Beyond is agony.

There is a certain affinity with Emily Brontë’s Gondal poetry in this style and this tone—one could guess that Brontë knew Greville’s often-anthologized poem. Should Oberon grant the boon, she will be saved from moral sensations of empathy, saved from the responsibilities of pity as well as from her own sorrow: ‘The heart, that throbbed at others’ woe / Shall then scarce feel its own.’ If Oberon will grant this, she in turn will wish him ‘never-fading bliss’:

So may the glow-worm’s glimmering light Thy tiny footsteps lead, To some new region of delight Unknown to mortal tread; (‘A Prayer for Indifference’)

The elf going blithely off to the new region of delight is closely associated with the speaker who would also be gaining a new ‘region of delight’ unknown to other mortals. Oberon’s life is a life of sensations rather than of thoughts. Sensations, unencumbered by sorrow, guilt, or depression, become something most desirable. Such are the sense impressions that the poem ends with, having begun with the turmoil of inner emotional feeling and heart-sadness:

And be thy acorn goblets filled With heaven’s ambrosial dew, From sweetest, freshest flowers distilled That shed fresh sweets for you

Taste, physical taste, takes over from emotional- feeling—again, an overturning of the hierarchical values that say emotional feeling is much more important than physical taste. When they write about fairies (and elves and nymphs), eighteenth-century women poets gain a release from moral pressure and cultural direction. They can imagine a life where sensation is honoured— and, as not the case with animals, honoured without pain. A number of writers wanted to take a moral holiday with the fairies, who can rejoice in pure sensation. So Anna Seward does, in her ‘Song of the Fairies to the Sea-nymphs’:

Hasten, from your coral caves, Every nymph that sportive laves, In the green sea’s oozy wells, And gilds the fins, and spots the shells! Hasten, and our morrice join, Ere the gaudy morning shine!

Surely this is imitated by Ann Radcliffe, in her heroine Emily’s poem ‘The Sea-nymph’ in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which might be called ‘The Sea-nymph’s Reply to Seward’s Fairies’. Radcliffe’s sea-nymph has the advantage over the fairies in being able to hide deep within the cool depths of the sea: ‘Down, down a thousand fathom deep, / Among the sounding seas I go’. Sea-nymphs do not, like Ann Finch, need night to escape the heating sun: ‘In cool arcades and glassy halls / We pass the sultry hours of noon,/ Beyond wherever sun-beam falls’. The sea-nymphs is not without moral responsibility—she tries to save ships, and to cheer ship wrecked mariners with song. But ‘Emily’s’ poem (which has its disturbing elements, and even undersea acknowledges authority and control emanating from Neptune) ends in a hope of perpetual pleasure:

Whoe’er ye are that love my lay, Come, when red sun-set tints the wave, To the still sands, where fairies play: There, in cool seas, I love to lave.

The harmony between land and sea, imaged in the dancing of sea-nymphs and land fairies, can take place only at night-time. Both poems, but especially Seward’s, fall into the category of Finch’s ‘Nocturnal Reverie’ in imagining an escape from daylight, a refuge from the hot glare of reason and certainty. The Enlightenment sun was certainly felt to have its negative side. Seward’s fairies invite the sea-nymphs to join in the antique dance, the ‘morrice’ before ‘gaudy morning’. The fairies and nymphs are somewhat timid creatures, it strikes us—they cannot be imagined as taking control, only as expressing elusiveness. They don’t get pinned down—although it is hard to deal with fairy beings extensively without imagining their falling into pain and imprisonment too, as is the case with Mrs Piozzi’s Two Fountains. At best, the idea of ‘fairies’ and other little supernatural beings like them permits the imagining of a fully pleasurable relation with nature. As the fairies are not encumbered with souls and responsibilities, they can love the natural world wholeheartedly and even take a share in its creation. Imagining such a love gives an imaginative release which yet is always known to be only evanescent, merely ‘fancy’.

Emily, the author of the sea-nymph poem within Radcliffe’s novel, is inspired by Renaissance public cultural images when she sees a water- pageant in Venice:

Neptune, with Venice personified as his queen, came on the undulating waves, surrounded by tritons and sea-nymphs. The fantastic splendour of this spectacle, together with the grandeur of the surrounding palaces, appeared like the vision of a poet suddenly embodied, and the fanciful images, which it awakened in Emily’s mind, lingered there. . . She indulged herself in imagining what might be the manners and delights of a sea-nymph, till she almost wished to throw off the habits of mortality, and plunge into the green wave to participate them.

Venice offers images of sensuous pleasure and escape, and the possibility that Venice itself momentarily represents of the ‘embodiment’ of poetry stimulates Emily to search for more freedom of manners and sensation. Such needs for freedom of manners and sensations of course have to be encoded; the very needs themselves are like the seanymphs, kept below, in the depths. Emily knows enough to categorize her reveries in a knowingly negative way: ‘she could not forbear smiling at the fancies she had been indulging’. But she goes ahead and embodies her ‘fanciful ideas’ in her poem.

Customarily, in ‘fairy’ poems the relation to the fairy world is thought of in terms of relation to water and air—those two elusive elements. The relation to the animal world is harder, darker, more land-based. Accounts of this relation bulge with substance, abound in impacts and disconcerting consumptions and destructions. That is the truer world, and of course the harder to deal with. Much had been done to separate animal from human. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in its latter parts, however, admits the great difficulty of setting up boundaries—Locke even admits that Nature is not interested. But few followers of Lockean politics and epistemology wanted to grapple with that. The women were living in a culture which asserted that their own ‘lower’ status was clearly known and naturally definable, just as was the arrangement of the species below them. In order to liberate the sensuousness in their own writing, they found ways to challenge the arrangements regarding species—including imagining the sensuous life in ‘species’ that didn’t exist, or the harder task of imagining what it feels like to respect the sensuous life of other beings who really do indubitably share our planet, if often only at our will and sovereign pleasure. The sensuousness of the women’s poetry seems all the more remarkable if one realizes how many cultural dictates militated against their taking note of their own sensations, and how surprising it is that (on the whole) they avoid that standby of Augustan appeal to the senses, the evocation of disgust. Women poets obviously suspect disgust as having ideological im- plications. Disgust belongs to the power of the categorizers, who know what is good and what is bad. Disgust is the reaction of the gazers who look at the female poet in Leapor’s Mira’s picture. Disgust won’t do. It turns off the senses that need to be turned on.

Source: Margaret Anne Doody, “Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteeth-Century Women Poets,” in Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730–1820, edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1999, pp. 3–31.