SOURCE: Loscocco, Paula. “Manly Sweetness: Katherine Philips among the Neoclassicals.” Huntington Library Quarterly 56, no. 3 (summer 1993): 259-79.

[In the following essay, Loscocco links the decline in popularity of Philip's poetry with changes in gender viewpoints and neoclassicism.]

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.”¹ 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 changes—especially 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. Though enthusiasm for Philips's poetry continued to be expressed during these years, a reworking of the central concepts of neoclassical poetics dramatically altered the gender-configurations of the terms used to describe her poems. As a consequence, readers who praised her writings at this time did so by focusing exclusively on what they perceived to be the masculine qualities of her writing. The third phase began while the second was still in progress. At the height of the laudatory and “masculine” period in Philips's reputation, a certain Thomas Newcomb used the prevailing preference for literary masculinity against her and condemned her poetry as being irredeemably feminine. Arising from and speaking to an aesthetics hostile to what a contemporary characterized as “Feminine Expression” of any kind,⁷ Newcomb's critique appears to have tipped the balance of opinion against Philips: after his attack of 1712, no edition of her works was printed for the rest of the century, and when individual poems were reprinted, they invariably appeared in specialized collections devoted to the works of “lady poetesses.”⁸ With scattered exceptions, it is only in recent years that scholars have argued for broader recognition of Philips's literary skills and merits.⁹

I

We can most readily gauge the nature of Philips's mid-seventeenth-century reception if we examine the commendatory verses prefacing her 1667 Poems. All of these verses follow the same general progression. A poem begins by addressing the fact of Philips's sex and its presence in her poetry; it goes on to discuss her poems in traditionally neoclassical terms. In this way, I would suggest, the commendatory poems portray Philips not only as a woman writer, but also—perhaps even primarily—as a neoclassical poet.

In her study of the conventions of seventeenth-century commendatory poems on women writers, Joanna Lipking comes to just the opposite conclusion.¹⁰ She agrees that men praise these women for their ability to excel (like men) as poets, but she also finds that this praise tends to revert to the fact that these poets are women. A “characteristic feature of men's commendations” of a woman writer, she notes, is “their ineluctable drift toward the feminine side of her identity” (p. 59). Lipking focuses exclusively on the gender-content of poems about women writers. At least in the case of Philips, however, mid-seventeenth-century readers did not limit themselves to issues connected with her gender. Rather, they repeatedly and pointedly broadened their discussions to include other aspects of her poetry. If we likewise expand our discussion, we can discover the ways in which Philips's contemporaries paid serious attention to her not only as a woman, or a woman poet, but also as a poet writing successfully within the neoclassical idiom of her day.

The central statement of the literary tastes of the era, John Dryden's 1668 An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, serves as a yardstick against which to measure the neoclassical content of the encomia on Philips.¹¹ Dryden begins by setting the ancients against the moderns. Eugenius, spokesman for the moderns, takes the upper hand immediately: “‘I cannot think so contemptibly of the Age in which I live, or so dishonourably of my own Countrey, as not to judge we equal the Ancients in most kinds of Poesie, and in some surpass them'” (p. 12). Roger Boyle, in “The Earl of Orrery to Mrs. Philips,” takes a similar if somewhat hyperbolic stand when he sets her achievements against those of the Greeks and Romans:

Past ages could not think those things you do,
For their Hill was their basis and height too:
So that 'tis truth, not compliment, to tell,
Your lowest height their highest did excel.

(Saintsbury, ed., Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, p. 494)

We have, of course, no way of determining Orrery's sincerity in these lines. But comparison of his words with those of Dryden suggests that Orrery's terms of praise are consistent with those of Restoration literary discussion generally, and are not specific to encomia on women poets.

Dryden also contrasts French and English dramatic poetry, arguing in favor of the latter. “‘[O]ur errours are so few, and little,’” states Neander, the proponent of English poetry, “‘and those things wherein we excel them [the French] so considerable, that we ought of right to be prefer'd before them'” (p. 51). Philips's translations of Corneille's plays made her work a natural focus for this kind of critical discussion. Orrery's praise of her translations remains pointedly within the terms of nationalist debate and does not refer to her gender:

          You English Corneil[le]'s Pompey with such flame,
That you both raise our wonder and his fame;
If he could read it, he like us would call
The copy greater than th'original. …
The French to learn our language now will seek,
To hear their greatest Wit more nobly speak.

(P. 494)

Philo-Philippa, in “To the excellent Orinda,” similarly claims in traditionally neoclassical fashion that Philips's translations “Refin'd and stamp'd” the French original, transforming its “ore” into English gold (p. 499).

Most centrally, Dryden's Essay and the encomia to Philips share a definition of literature as “sweet” yet “correct,” “easy” yet “significant,” a definition highly prized by neoclassical poetics. The writers of the “‘last Age'” (p. 13), Dryden, in the person of Eugenius, notes,

“can produce nothing so courtly writ, or which expresses so much the Conversation of a Gentleman, as Sir John Suckling; nothing so even, sweet, and flowing as Mr. Waller; nothing so Majestique, so correct as Sir John Denham; nothing so elevated, so copious, and full of spirit, as Mr. Cowley. …”

All of them were thus far of Eugenius his opinion, that the sweetness of English Verse was never understood or practis'd by our Fathers … : and every one was willing to acknowledge how much our Poesie is improv'd, by the happiness of some Writers yet living; who first taught us to mould our thoughts into easie and significant words.

(P. 14)

Dryden's pairings of terms here, “sweet” and “easie” with “Majestique” and “significant,” strikingly recall the single most common feature of the commendatory poems on Philips: the attention paid to her synthesis of “masculine” and “feminine” poetic qualities. In this context, the encomia's terms of gender, though deriving from and specific to the poems' female subject, also participate in general poetic discourse in ways separate from the sex of the poet. “Feminine” does refer to Philips's gender; it also refers to the qualities of “smoothness” and “sweetness” valued by contemporary literary aesthetics. “Masculine” suggests the anomalous achievement of poetry by a woman; it also suggests the qualities of “wit” and “strength” that were understood to ground and steady the mellifluousness of neoclassical verse.

Stanza 3 of Cowley's “Upon Mrs. Philips her Poems” provides a clear example of the dual allegiances that terms like “strength” and “sweetness” have in the commendatory poems:

          Where'er I see an excellence,
I must admire to see thy well-knit sense,
Thy numbers gentle, and thy fancies high,
Those as thy forehead smooth, these sparkling as thine eye.
          'Tis solid, and 'tis manly all,
          Or rather, 'tis angelical:
          For, as in Angels, we
          Do in thy verses see
Both improv'd sexes eminently meet;
They are than Man more strong, and more than Woman sweet.

(P. 496)

Lipking focuses on Cowley's reference to Philips's forehead and eyes as evidence of a male poet's inability to see beyond gender (p. 61). It is perhaps more to the point, however, to note that Cowley's mixed-sex “angelical” is an almost perfect analogue to Dryden's ideal of poetry that is both “strong” and “sweet.” All that Cowley has done to the terms here is to make explicit, as suits his occasion, the gender-markings of the two adjectives.

Philo-Philippa is even more revealing. Her poem describes Philips's translation of Pompey as that play's ultimate point of development, mixing as it does Philips's feminine “fancy” and Corneille's masculine “sense” (p. 499). She then offers one of the encomia's most neoclassical critiques of Philips's poetry:

A gliding sea of crystal doth best show
How smooth, clear, full, and rich your verse doth flow:
Your words are chosen, cull'd, not by chance writ,
To make the sense, as anagrams do hit.
Your rich becoming words on the sense wait,
As Maids of Honour on a Queen of State.
'Tis not white satin makes a verse more white,
Or soft; Iron is both, write you on it.

(P. 499)

Smooth sense, soft iron: Philo-Philippa's terms dovetail with Dryden's, exemplifying the ways in which the commendatory verses prefacing Philips's 1667 Poems portray her as a successful poet according to the literary standards of her day.¹²

As the poems by Philo-Philippa and especially Cowley suggest, the reputation of Philips's poetry was bolstered by the fact that neoclassical literary discourse in mid-seventeenth-century England was itself gendered: commentators regularly used terms of gender to describe and praise poetic achievement. Lipking notes that the encomia on women poets compliment women for combining masculine strength and wit with feminine beauty and softness, but she downplays the crucial fact that these qualities were held up as ideals for writers of both sexes (p. 58). Men as well as women found their writings praised for being, in Cowley's words, “than Man more strong, and more than Woman sweet.” Cowley, in fact, perhaps the single most applauded mid-century poet,¹³ was himself frequently described in this manner.

On the occasion of Cowley's death in 1667, John Denham wrote of his poetry:

His fancy and his judgment such,
Each to the other seem'd too much,
His severe judgment (giving Law)
His modest fancy kept in awe:
As rigid Husbands jealous are,
When they believe their Wives too fair.

(Works of Denham, ed. Banks, p. 151)

Critical discourse had by 1667 established as conventional the proposition that (implicitly feminine) fancy required the counterpoising weight of (implicitly masculine) judgment. Denham's description of Cowley modifies this convention in several ways. First, he emphasizes the equality of fancy and judgment, noting that “Each to the other seem'd too much.” He extends this perception into the following lines, where ambiguity as to whether “fancy” or “judgment” is the subject of the verb subtly undermines the traditional priority given “severe judgment.” In addition, his reference to “Husbands” and “Wives” is unusually explicit in its gendering of judgment and fancy. By characterizing husbands / judgment as “severe,” “rigid,” “jealous,” and apt as a consequence to “believe” their “modest” wives / fancy “too fair,” moreover, Denham alters conventional emphasis. Instead of virtuous judgment holding licentious fancy in check, virtuous fancy is presented as the faultless equal of a judgment that tends to over-censoriousness and misperception.

If Denham locates in Cowley's writing a marriage of gendered fancy and judgment, Thomas Sprat goes considerably further, praising Cowley's poetry for its ability to embrace what he calls a “variety of Sexes in Poetry.”¹⁴ He begins his discussion of Cowley's literary achievement neutrally enough, noting that “[i]n his life he join'd the innocence and sincerity of the Scholar with the humanity and good behaviour of the Courtier. In his Poems he united the Solidity and Art of the one with the Gentility and Gracefulness of the other” (pp. 128-29). Almost immediately, however, he brings to the surface the gender-markings of scholarly “solidity” and courtly “gracefulness.” Certain readers might argue that Cowley's verses were far from uniformly “graceful”; this, Sprat argues, was Cowley's “choice, not his fault”:

Where the matter required it, he was as gentle as any man. But where higher Virtues were chiefly to be regarded, an exact numerosity was not then his main care. This may serve to answer those who upbraid some of his Pieces with roughness, and with more contractions than they are willing to allow. But these Admirers of gentlenesse without sinews should know that different Arguments must have different Colours of Speech: that there is a kind of variety of Sexes in Poetry as well as in Mankind: that as the peculiar excellence of the Feminine Kind is smoothnesse and beauty, so strength is the chief praise of the Masculine.

(P. 129)

Though Sprat here promotes “strong” or “masculine” poetry, he does so only in defiance of critics who require unrelievedly “smooth” or “Feminine” verse. The ideal is gendered “variety”: he applauds Cowley for choosing a style that is, as he sees it, alternately sweetly “Feminine” or strongly “Masculine,” as the content requires. Because he describes literary style through metaphors of gender, Sprat also distances his discussion (though perhaps inadvertently) from any reference to a writer's actual sex. “Masculine” and “Feminine” describe styles appropriate to the material being written, not to the sex of the person doing the writing.

Cowley's writing was portrayed by others, then, in much the same terms that he himself used to portray Philips's. Not coincidentally, in the years following the deaths of Philips (1664) and Cowley (1667), a number of writers joined the two poets together in the kind of literary union of the sexes perceived to be at the heart of their respective poetics. James Tyrrell's poem prefacing Philips's 1667 Poems notes that Cowley—“the great Pindar's greater Son”—has “retir'd” to Heaven, leaving the world bereft: “He, and Orinda from us gone, / What Name, like theirs, shall we now call upon?” (p. 500). Francis Bernard, commending his friend, Thomas Flatman, on his 1674 Poems and Songs, argues that anyone “who e're did hear, / Of Cowley or Orinda's fame” would appreciate Flatman's poems.¹⁵ In her 1688 Poetical Recreations, Jane Barker, warning her friends against the now debauched Muses, cites Cowley and Philips as the twin poets of chaste love:

Though to Orinda they [the Muses] were ty'd,
That nought their Friendship cou'd divide:
And Cowley's Mistress had a Flame
As pure and lasting as his Fame:
Yet now they're all grown Prostitutes.(16)

Perhaps the definitive pairing occurs in James Gardiner's prefatory poem to Samuel Woodford's 1667 A Paraphrase Upon The Psalms of David.¹⁷ Gardiner understands English letters to have restored drooping poesy to its original glory, and he cites Philips and Cowley as beacons of a new poetic golden age in which “pure spirit[s]” mix with “manly Theam[s]”:

One of each Sex this fruitful Age has shown,
          (And fruitful had she been, if none
          But that immortal Paire were known;)
          Though she has many more to boast,
Cowley, and bright Orinda do adorn it most.

(Sig. (d)v)

The frequency with which writers like Gardiner cite Philips and Cowley as their age's “immortal Paire” in poetry makes it clear that Philips was praised by her contemporaries as the peer of a writer like Cowley. The extraordinary pairing of a man and a woman poet also reinforces the idea that mid-seventeenth-century literary culture understood “variety of the Sexes,” an even blend of masculine and feminine literary attributes, as a constitutive element of its poetry.

When Cowley described Philips's poems as “than Man more strong, and more than Woman sweet,” then, he was speaking within what was to his contemporaries an established literary aesthetic. By explicitly gendering “strength” as masculine and “sweetness” (or “softness”) as feminine, Cowley used neoclassical terms in ways common to the authors of his era. And by positing an ideal balance between these terms, Cowley joined other writers in assigning equal value to contemporary concepts of literary masculinity and femininity.

II

The aesthetic Cowley described, however, did not last. As early as the 1670s, there appeared what seems to have been a backlash against the notion of a literary aesthetic based on positive attributes linked to both genders.¹⁸ Though “sweet” and (especially) “strong” remained critical terms of choice from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth, articulating central neoclassical literary values, the concepts of gender associated with the two terms changed dramatically in the late seventeenth century. Mid-seventeenth-century writers, as I have shown, linked the terms “strong” and “sweet” to contemporary concepts of masculinity and femininity. By the end of the century, however, these terms had acquired an entirely different set of gender-associations: “strong” and “sweet” had come to be attached only to masculinity; femininity had been removed from encomiastic critical vocabulary altogether. By the end of the century, literary femininity—frequently but not always signaled by the term “softness”—had in fact become a potent tool of critical dispraise. I describe this shift in gender-associations in order to provide a context in which to understand the vicissitudes of Philips's literary reputation.

Wentworth Dillon, the earl of Roscommon, provides a trenchant example of the ways in which terms of praise previously associated with femininity could be re-gendered as masculine. In 1657, James Howell had proposed a marriage between “[m]ale” English and implicitly “feminine” romance languages like French.¹⁹ Twenty-seven years later, in his 1684 An Essay on Translated Verse, Roscommon redefined the relationship between the two languages as a competition in which the English tortoise overtakes the French hare:

But now We [English] shew the world a nobler way,
And in Translated Verse do more than They [French],
Serene and clear, Harmonious Horace flows,
With sweetness not to be exprest in Prose.

English “sweetness” here is not simply a question of verse as opposed to prose. Rather, Roscommon states,

The Fault is more their Languages than theirs:
'Tis courtly, florid, and abounds in words,
Of softer sound than ours perhaps affords;
But who did ever in French Authors see
The comprehensive English Energy?
… I'l Recant, when France can shew me Wit,
As strong as Ours, and as succinctly Writ.

(Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays, 2:298)

The superior “serene and clear … sweetness” that Roscommon hears in English, then, is a function not only of versification but also of the language's native energy, succinctness, and strength. French, on the other hand, owes its “courtly” and “florid” nature to its inherently “softer sound.” Though Roscommon distinguishes between admirable sweetness and unfortunate softness, however, he does not explicitly attach gender to either quality.²⁰ He leaves this for John Dryden to do, in the commendatory poem which prefaces Roscommon's work.

In his 1668 Essay (written 1665), Dryden had spoken for his time when he had embraced a literary aesthetic based on “feminine” sweetness and “masculine” strength. Twenty years later, he spoke for a different time when he articulated an altered understanding of these two key neoclassical concepts. In his 1684 poem, “To the Earl of Roscommon, on his Excellent Essay on Translated Verse,” Dryden nimbly repatriates “sweetness” into masculine critical territory.²¹ He recounts how in medieval times “barb'rous Nations, and more barb'rous Times / Debas'd the majesty of Verse to Rhymes,” but how, later, Italy and France resuscitated poetry by showing “What Rhyme improv'd in all its height can be; / At best a pleasing Sound, and fair barbarity” (p. 172). It was up to the English, however, to complete the restoration of poetry, by transforming “fair” and implicitly feminine “Rhyme” into explicitly masculine “Verse.” “Brittain, last,” Dryden notes, “In Manly sweetness all the rest surpass'd” (p. 172). Manly sweetness: the phrase is remarkable, given the precision with which poets twenty years earlier had repeatedly characterized “sweetness” as “like a woman.” It is possible that Dryden here has simply condensed the traditional pairing, distilling masculine strength and feminine sweetness into “manly sweetness.” But his unusual way of formulating the convention suggests that the phrase instead represents a self-conscious attempt to legislate the way in which the term “sweetness” is to be understood. Used in this way, the adjective “manly” not only prevents the almost automatic association of “sweetness” with femininity, but it also replaces femininity with the opposing idea of manliness. The phrase “manly sweetness” works to redefine a central neoclassical literary term away from femininity and toward masculinity.

My reading of “manly sweetness” is supported by the remarkable fact that in the ode, “To the Pious Memory of the Accomplisht Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew,” written two years later, Dryden scrupulously avoids characterizing her virtues and achievements as sweet or feminine in any way.²² In his portrayal of Killigrew's literary and moral lineage, for example, Dryden never once mentions a female relation. Instead, her “Father was transfus'd into [her] Blood” (p. 110); she acquired her “Morals” and “Noble Vigour” by reading “the best of Books, her Fathers Life” (p. 111). At her birth, her “Brother-Angels” played their harps (p. 110), and “all the Blest Fraternity of Love” rejoiced (p. 111). Dryden draws deliberate attention to the ways in which he separates Killigrew from her natural gender, as comparison of his poem on Killigrew with Cowley's on Philips makes clear. Philips, Cowley states, is “than Man more strong, and more than Woman sweet.” Killigrew's “Wit,” Dryden declares, “was more than Man, her Innocence a Child!” (p. 111). A child: Dryden here de-genders what had once been understood as the feminine quality of “Innocence,” while at the same time he preserves the paired symmetry of Cowley's neoclassical formulation. His efforts suggest the degree of opprobrium that seems by the mid-1680s to have attached to literary terms associated in any way with women or femininity.

The recoil away from femininity in neoclassical poetics was in full force by the mid-1680s, but we can find evidence of its existence before then. As early as the 1670s, individual male writers began to lash out at poetry that could be characterized as either feminine or sweet. In 1670, for example, Samuel Woodford, in a poem prefacing Izaak Walton's Life of Herbert, declares that “Sacred Poesie”

No longer shall a Virgin reckoned be,
                    (What ere with others 'tis) by me,
                    A Female Muse, as were the Nine:
                    But (full of Vigor Masculine)
An Essence Male, with Angels his Companions shine.(23)

Woodford banishes femininity from the realm of sacred poetry altogether, insisting that the spirit of such poetry is essentially male. His vision of poetry (and later of Herbert) as a male angel anticipates Dryden's description of Killigrew's “Brother-Angels” and contrasts sharply with Cowley's angels, in whom “Both improv'd sexes eminently meet.” In 1677, the writer “A. B.” similarly defends the masculine “Vigour” of John Cleveland's muse against “smooth, weak Rhymer[s].”²⁴ “Let such to Women write,” he sneers, spelling out the thinly veiled gender-markings behind his comments, “you write to Men” (sig. a4v).

The generation of women poets who came of age after the mid-seventeenth century offered eloquent testimony concerning changes in attitudes toward gender in the neoclassical literary environment. A number of these writers identified the mid-century as the Age of Orinda, and bemoaned the fact that, by the mid-1680s, that age had come and gone. They were acutely aware that an aesthetic that welcomed literary values identified with women, like sweetness or softness, had represented an encouraging environment for actual women writers. They were equally aware that an aesthetic that scorned what it conceived of as feminine literary values, or appropriated terms traditionally linked to femininity as “male,” would almost certainly prove to be inhospitable to women writers.

Perhaps the clearest statement of the effect on women poets of the shift in critical values appears in Anne Killigrew's poem “Upon the saying that my VERSES were made by another,” published in 1686.²⁵ Killigrew compares her circumstances with those of Philips, and finds not only that Philips was admired apart from the fact of her sex but also that she lived in an age that singled out for particular applause the kinds of writing that it associated with women:

          Orinda, (Albions and her Sexes Grace)
Ow'd not her Glory to a Beauteous Face,
It was her Radiant Soul that shon With-in. …
Nor did her Sex at all obstruct her Fame,
But higher ‘mong the Stars it fixt her Name;
What she did write, not only all allow'd,
But ev'ry Laurel, to her Laurel, bow'd!

(P. 46)

What a woman of Philips's day wrote, Killigrew remarks with revealing astonishment, was not only “allow'd”—it was actually preferred. In contrast, Killigrew describes her own era as an “Envious Age” (p. 47) in which readers unjustly accuse her of plagiarism and scorn her person. The comparison with Philips suggests that Killigrew's “Sex” has indeed “obstruct[ed] her Fame.” And though she claims that the hostility she has encountered is directed “only to Me alone” (p. 47), her decision to compare her situation with that of a poet who had been dead for almost two decades implies a contrast more of eras than of persons.

Other writers corroborate Killigrew's sense that a female “golden age” of literature lies in the mid-century past. Among the poems prefacing Jane Barker's 1688 Poetical Recreations is one by “Philaster” which begins,

Soon as some envious Angel's willing hand
Snatch'd Great Orinda from our happy Land …
Then our Male-Poets modestly thought fit,
To claim the honour'd Primacy in Wit.

(Sig. A5)

A “Young Lady of Quality,” writing on the occasion of Aphra Behn's death in 1689, voices similar sentiments.²⁶ Tracing a poetical lineage from Philips to Behn (p. 55), she now finds the line broken:

          Let all our Hopes despair and dye,
          Our Sex for ever shall neglected lye;
Aspiring Man has now regain'd the Sway,
To them we've lost the Dismal Day.

(P. 56)

As the examples of Philaster and the “Young Lady of Quality” suggest, expressing fears that “Man has now regain'd the Sway” was by the 1680s a conventional means to flatter²⁷ or mourn a woman poet. Nevertheless, receptiveness to writing by women and to literary qualities associated with femininity did decline dramatically in the late seventeenth century, and this lends some poignancy to conventional tributes to the Age of Orinda. As Margaret Newcastle warned with astonishing prescience in 1653, eras like her own, in which things associated with femininity were welcomed and encouraged, were fleeting:

if it be an Age when the effeminate spirits rule, as most visible they doe in every Kingdome, let us take the advantage, and make the best … in witty Poetry, or any thing that may bring honour to our Sex.²⁸

An age in which “effeminate spirits” rule: Newcastle's phrase, suggesting as it does both actual women and “feminine” values, almost perfectly expressed the mid-century literary situation. Within thirty years, her warning about the future proved equally accurate.

The change in critical values that women writers in the 1680s describe—away from a literary aesthetic that held femininity and masculinity in equal esteem—gained considerable momentum in the early eighteenth century. Perhaps the clearest expression of this fact appears in critical discussion about an ostensibly unrelated issue: the increasing professionalization of literature. Such discussion has a bearing on an analysis of the gender-configurations of neoclassical poetics because it characterizes the difference between amateur and professional writing as a difference between a feminine (or effeminate) worse and a masculine better.

Alexander Pope, in a 1710 letter to Henry Cromwell, distinguishes between two kinds of poets.²⁹ The first includes those who, writing “to establish a reputation” (p. 109), at times produce an “extreamly majestic” poetry (p. 110); Pope clearly imagines himself to be among this group of writers. He cites Richard Crashaw as an example of the second kind of poet. Crashaw, states Pope, “writ like a Gentleman, that is, at leisure hours, and … to keep out of idleness” (p. 109). Pope refers to writers like him as “Versifiers and witty Men, rather than as Poets,” and associates them with “Miscellan[y]” or amateur writing (p. 110).

In the imitation of Horace's First Epistle of the Second Book (1637), Pope attaches gender to the two kinds of writing he described to Cromwell.³⁰ He links “Gentlemen” poets with amateur writing (p. 203) and locates the heyday of such poets at the Restoration:

          In Days of Ease, when now the weary Sword
Was sheath'd, and Luxury with Charles restor'd; …
The Soldier breath'd the Gallantries of France,
And ev'ry flow'ry Courtier writ Romance. …
No wonder then, when all was Love and Sport,
The willing Muses were debauch'd at Court;
On each enervate string they taught the Note
To pant, or tremble thro' an Eunuch's throat.

(P. 207-9)

Pope could not be clearer: the age of amateur versifying was an age in which “flow'ry” romance and “debauch'd” Muses emasculated poetry, “soften[ing]” (p. 207) the “Soldier” into a lisping “Eunuch.” His own age, he acknowledges, continues in this tradition of effeminate amateurism: “Sons, Sires, and Grandsires, all will wear the Bays, / Our Wives read Milton, and our Daughters Plays” (p. 209). Pope nostalgically depicts a vague but distinctly masculine “Time was,” a mythic past that contrasts with both the Restoration and his own age, when a “sober Englishman” could govern “his servants,” “his Wife,” and “his Son,” imitating “his Fathers” and instructing “his Heir” (p. 209). Pope then attaches “true” poetry to this patriarchal idyll. The “Poet,” he declares, is not a playful “Man of Rymes” (p. 225), but rather “a Poet's of some weight, / And (tho' no Soldier) useful to the State” (p. 211). A true poet is like a “Soldier” before the Restoration “soften'd” him: like Horace, he has “a manly Regard to his own Character” (p. 192).

The identification by 1700 of good or serious poetry with masculinity and poor or amateur versifying with femininity had significant impact on early eighteenth-century characterizations of previous poets. A critic who wished to commend a seventeenth-century poet resorted to eighteenth-century encomiastic terms and concepts that proved, in terms of gender, to be the inverse of the ones chosen by that poet's contemporary admirers. In 1697, for example, in an anthology entitled Miscellany Poems, the editor distinguishes between past and present poetry:

I was considering how much this Art [Poetry] was esteemed amongst our Forefathers, and how Venerable, nay, almost Sacred, the Name of a Poet was then. … I think the great Difference [between then and now] lies here, That Poetry is now no longer the Fountain of Wisdom, the School of Virtue.³¹

In the poem that follows, he notes that the works of the “Ancients” (p. 32) which he so admires are “more Masculine” than those of modern writers, who, he complains, are mere “Womens Fools” (p. 38). When he praises “our Forefathers” and the “Ancients” as pillars of poetry, however, he does not mean to commend only classical writers like Homer or Sophocles or Virgil. Rather, the final exemplar of “ancient” masculinity is, in his view, the writer who had for decades been singled out as the “sweetest” of the early neoclassical poets, Edmund Waller:

But if you wou'd Respect or Love express,
And shew your Passion in a Comely Dress,
Learn how from Courtly Waller's Deathless Layes
Chastly to Love, with Modesty to Praise.

(P. 42)

The terms of commendation available to a writer in 1697 simply did not include the words traditionally applied to Waller, like “sweet” or “soft,” marked as these were by their prior association with femininity. The closest a writer in that year could come to describing Waller's “Courtly” poetry was to describe his purity of style and content as “Comely”—in a “Masculine” sort of way.

As with Waller, so with Philips: by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the critical vocabulary available to commend a woman poet like Philips was almost entirely masculine in its orientation. This situation accounts for the curious fact that several early eighteenth-century writers praise her poetry only for its manly strength—and not, as Cowley did, also for its womanly sweetness. Theophilus Cibber echoes other critics when he discusses her poetry:

Mrs. Philips's poetry has not harmony of versification, or amorous tenderness to recommend it, but it has a force of thinking, which few poets of the other sex can exceed, and if it is without graces, it has yet a great deal of strength.³²

Dryden's 1699 epistolary comments to Elizabeth Thomas on Philips demonstrate that praise of Philips's “strength” means praise of literary qualities identified with masculinity.³³ “'Tis not over gallant, I must confess,” he begins,

to say this of the fair Sex; but most certain it is, that they generally write with more Softness than Strength. On the contrary, you want neither Vigour in your Thoughts, nor force in your Expressions, nor Harmony in your Numbers, and methinks I find much of Orinda in your Manner (to whom I had the Honour to be related, and also to be Known).

(P. 125)

Dryden's remarks are extraordinary in a number of ways. First, he links writers of “the fair Sex” with literary “Softness”—and he makes it clear that it is far from complimentary to women to do so. He also describes Thomas's “Manner” as implicitly masculine, characterized as it is by a “Strength” not “generally” seen in writings by women. Most strikingly, however, he identifies this admirably masculine style, possessing as it does both “Vigour” and “force,” as the “Orinda” in Thomas's writing.

Richard Gwinnet, also writing to Elizabeth Thomas, singles out the “masculine” qualities of Philips's poems for praise as well. Philips's “Country Life,” Gwinnet writes,

is so sweet a Poem, and sprinkled with such profound Philosophical Thoughts, expressed in easy Poetical Language, … that though I have read several Poems, in more Tongues than One, upon the same Subject, yet I do not know where to find a better.³⁴

Gwinnet describes Philips's poetry as “sweet,” “profound,” and “easy,” neoclassical terms which, he goes on to suggest, are fundamentally “Masculine.” “I have looked a little into Mrs. Philips,” Gwinnet writes, “and it is not the first Time I have been wonderfully pleased with her solid Masculine Thoughts, in no Feminine Expression” (p. 38). Like Dryden on Roscommon, Gwinnet commends the “sweet[ness]” of Philips's poem as one of the qualities that identifies and places her work within the masculine literary universe. By suggesting that her poems have “no Feminine Expression,” Gwinnet also pays Philips one of the highest compliments available to a reader—especially a reader of women's verses—in the early eighteenth century. A far cry from Cowley's “than Man more strong, and more than Woman sweet,” Gwinnet's phrase nevertheless matches Cowley's in its attempt to praise Philips's poems in terms that reflect the gender-configurations reigning in contemporary neoclassical discourse.

III

A markedly different response to Philips appeared in 1712. In that year, the Reverend Thomas Newcomb published a versified lampoon on “modern” writers entitled Bibliotheca.³⁵ The poem's mock-hero is a befuddled old “Doctor” who happily fondles a series of books; Newcomb inserts his critiques of individual writers as the Doctor moves from volume to volume. Women poets come in for particular attack. “One day,” writes Newcomb, the Doctor “Does to the Female World repair, / To please himself among the Fair, / (Where if no Sense was to be found, / He's sure to be oblig'd with Sound)” (p. 28). Newcomb is especially biting in regard to Philips. “ORINDA next demands his view / For Titles fam'd and Rhiming too; / And had been read, but that her Song, / To be admir'd, was quite too long” (p. 30). If the Doctor never actually reads Philips, however, Newcomb does, and he describes her poetry in damningly gendered terms:

Their Mistress['s] want of Pride to shew,
Her Numbers glide but wondrous low,
Instead of Rapture, give us Sleep,
And striving to be humble, creep. …
Softness her Want of Sense supplies,
She faints in every line and dyes.

(Pp. 30-31)

Comparison with Alexander Pope's 1711 An Essay on Criticism brings Newcomb's agenda out into the open:

If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep:
Then, at the last, and only Couplet fraught
With some unmeaning Thing they call a Thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,
That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along.(36)

What Newcomb adds to Pope's lines is simply the association of poor verse with women and femininity. The punning phrase, “want of pride to shew,” implies that a woman's attempt to express her modesty serves only to reveal her immodesty. Substituting “sense” with “Softness” suggests that her poetry is feminine in the specific sense of being weak. And Newcomb's last line adds a sly sexual innuendo that obliterates the passage's nominal focus on Philips's poetry itself.

Newcomb must substantially misrepresent both Philips and her poetry in order to depict them in the feminized way that he does. He refers to the poet, for example, as a “Virgin” and an “Unhappy Maid,” and claims that she wielded her poetry (in vain) to charm some “Youth” into “Wedlock” (pp. 30-31). In fact, Philips was married at age sixteen, before she wrote almost any of the extant poetry; she also never wrote courtship verses of any kind. Newcomb's claims to the contrary suggest a willful misreading of her poems in the service of blasting Philips as a failed—because female—poet.³⁷

Newcomb, seeking to censure Philips, is as careful to paint her with her sex as Cibber, Dryden, and Gwinnet, aiming at praise, are to circumvent it. In so doing, he takes what is for his time a highly idiosyncratic negative position on the seventeenth-century poet.³⁸ Unfortunately for Philips, however, Newcomb's lone denunciation of her poetry, supported as it was by a neoclassical aesthetic profoundly antagonistic to “Feminine Expression,” seems to have carried considerable weight: as noted earlier, the last eighteenth-century edition of Philips's Poems appeared in 1710, just two years before Newcomb published the Bibliotheca.³⁹

We can explain Newcomb's influence in part by pointing to the fact that multiple editions of the Bibliotheca kept Newcomb's censure of Philips before the reading public throughout the eighteenth century. Critic William Roberts notes that John Nichols, manager of Gentleman's Magazine, included Newcomb's poem in the third volume of his Select Collection of Poems, and that John Bell's 1781 and 1807 reprints of the works of William King also included the Bibliotheca.⁴⁰ As Roberts notes, enthusiasm for Philips's works may have been “offset to some degree by the cleverly derogatory comments of Thomas Newcomb's Bibliotheca” (p. 194); by the mid-eighteenth century, the sustained exposure of readers to his negative assessment of her poetry may have helped to obscure it from neoclassical view altogether.

Multiple editions of the Bibliotheca, however, do not in themselves adequately account for the kind of critical clout Newcomb's rather obscure poem seems to have carried. A more significant factor behind the poem's effect on Philips's literary reputation lies in Newcomb's manipulation of a critical climate in which the highest praise was to refer to a poet's work as “manly” strong and the lowest censure was to call it womanly “soft.” Like Cowley's, Philips's poems would surely have gone out of fashion in the eighteenth century without Newcomb's help.⁴¹ But Newcomb hurried Philips's decline, and insured its persistence, by branding her poetry with her sex—something which had not previously been done to this particular poet. The means of censuring Philips as a feminine writer had existed from the 1670s; few critics before Newcomb, however, had cared to censure Philips, and thus few if any had described her in this way. Once Newcomb's damaging charges of the feminine nature of Philips's poetry were made, however, only a readership willing to take on the daunting task of defending a woman's writing from her sex could have saved Philips's reputation. In the world of eighteenth-century neoclassicism, where a woman's writing and her sex were, as in Newcomb, increasingly linked and jointly censured, this kind of readership simply did not exist. As a consequence, and according to Newcomb's wishes, Philips's poems “faint[ed] in every line, and dye[d].”

Notes

1. “On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips,” in Poems By the most deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips The matchless Orinda (London, 1667), sig. gv. The complete 1678 edition of Philips's Poems is reprinted in George Saintsbury, ed., Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, vol. 1. (Oxford, 1905), 485-612. Cowley's poem appears on 502-3. Subsequent discussion of the encomia on Philips's Poems provides page references to Saintsbury's edition.

2. John Dryden, Henry Vaughan, Sir William Temple, Wentworth Dillon, the earl of Roscommon, and Roger Boyle, the earl of Orrery, are among the many who wrote poems of tribute to Philips.

3. Harriette Andreadis, “The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664,” Signs 15 (1989): 35. Disparagement of Philips and her writing persists, sometimes even among scholars committed to focusing serious attention on her work. In the introduction to his recent edition of Philips's poems, for example, Patrick Thomas derides her efforts to cultivate a sophisticated audience of readers and fellow-writers, accusing her of “weaving a web of Frenchified literary friendships” (Katherine Philips, The Poems, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda, ed. Patrick Thomas [Stump Cross, England, 1990], 10). He also mocks her “deluded belief in unanimity between friends,” noting that when she heard of a friend's marriage, she “cried herself nearly blind” (p. 16). The blurring of poetry and biography implicit in Thomas's comments recurs in other negative critiques.

4. Andreadis's explanation is not entirely satisfactory. The conventional nature of Philips's poetry renders Andreadis's sense of her work as a quasi-autobiographical revelation of her sexuality problematic. And negative reaction to Philips began in the eighteenth century—not in the nineteenth, as Andreadis states.

5. Patrick Thomas provides an invaluable compilation of the history of Philips's reception to 1800 in his edition (pp. 22-39).

6. As the title indicates, this essay focuses on Philips's place within the critical tradition of neoclassicism, where her reputation declined. It glances only briefly at the different and later issue of Philips's place within the critical tradition of women's literary history, where her work was regarded favorably throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See note 8 below.

7. Richard Gwinnet, in Pylades and Corinna; or, Memoirs of the Lives, Amours, and Writings of Richard Gwinnet … and Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, 2 vols. (London, 1731-32), 2:38-39.

8. The last eighteenth-century edition of Philips's Poems appeared in 1710, just two years before Newcomb's Bibliotheca. The last edition of her Letters appeared in 1729. The first modern edition of her poems was brought out by Saintsbury in 1905; the most recent is Thomas's 1990 Poems. Her letters have not been reprinted. Some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections that include and discuss Philips's poems include George Ballard, Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain (Oxford, 1752); George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, eds., Poems by Eminent Ladies, 2 vols. (London, 1755); Alexander Dyce, ed., Specimens of British Poetesses (London, 1827); Frederic Rowton, ed., The Female Poets of Great Britain (London, 1848); George Bethune, ed., The British Female Poets (London, 1849); Sarah Josepha Hale, Women's Record: or, Sketches of all Distinguished Women (London, 1853); Jane Williams, The Literary Women of England (London, 1861); and Julia Kavanagh, English Women of Letters, 2 vols. (London, 1863).

9. See Marilyn L. Williamson, Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650-1750 (Detroit, 1990), 64-133; Dorothy Mermin, “Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch,” ELH 57 (1990): 335-55; Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing, 1649-88 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1989), 128-42; Elizabeth H. Hageman, “Katherine Philips: The Matchless Orinda,” in Katharine M. Wilson, ed., Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation (Athens, Ga., 1987), 566-608; Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), 62-100 (esp. 85-87). Given Philips's reception history, it is somewhat ironic that current efforts to reintroduce the poet into mainstream critical discussion require specialized studies of women writers.

10. Joanna Lipking, “Fair Originals: Women Poets in Male Commendatory Poems,” Eighteenth Century Life, n.s., 12 (1988): 58-72. Page references are given subsequently in the text.

11. John Dryden, Prose, 1668-1691, ed. Samuel Holt Monk, vol. 2 of The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), 2-81. Page references are given subsequently in the text.

12. Philo-Philippa's portrayal of Philips's style as a clear, full sea of flowing crystal also corresponds to a central neoclassical passage in John Denham's Cooper's Hill: “O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream / My great example, as it is my theme! / Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, / Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full” (The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. Theodore Howard Banks, 2d ed. [Hamden, Conn, 1969], 77). Page references to this edition are given subsequently in the text.

13. Arthur H. Nethercot, The Reputation of Abraham Cowley (1660-1800) (Philadelphia, 1923), 5.

14. “An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Abraham Cowley: Written to Mr. M. Clifford,” in J. E. Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Bloomington, Ind., 1963), 2:119-46. Page references to this edition are given subsequently in the text.

15. Thomas Flatman, Poems and Songs (London, 1674), sig. (a8).

16. Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations: Consisting of Original Poems, Songs, Odes, & c (London, 1688), 95.

17. “To my dear Friend Mr. Samuel Woodford, upon his Paraphrase of the Psalms,” in Samuel Woodford, A Paraphrase upon the Psalms of David (London, 1667), sig. (c3)-(d2). Page references to this edition are given subsequently in the text.

18. Lipking finds that male praise of women writers “went out of fashion” at the turn of the century (p. 66). She ascribes this change to the fact that by the eighteenth century writing by women was less of a novelty (p. 69).

19. “Of the Original of the English Toung, And her Association With the Italian, Spanish, and French, & c.,” in [James Howell], Poems on Several Choice and Various Subjects (London, 1663), 20-21.

20. He does so implicitly, however. The poem participates in a larger nationalist discourse in which anything associated with France—especially “soft[ness]”—carries connotations of femininity at best and effeminacy at worst.

21. John Dryden, Poems 1681-1684, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., vol. 2 of The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), 172-74. Page references to this edition are given subsequently in the text.

22. John Dryden, Poems 1685-1692, ed. Earl Miner, vol. 3 of The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), 109-15. Page references to this edition are given subsequently in the text.

23. Robert H. Ray, ed., “The Herbert Allusion Book: Allusions to George Herbert in the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in Philology 83 (1986): 99.

24. John Cleveland, Clievelandi Vindiciae; Or, Clieveland's Genuine Poems, Orations, Epistles, & c. (London, 1677), sig. Bv. Page references to this edition are given subsequently in the text.

25. Anne Killigrew, Poems (1686), ed. Richard Morton (Gainesville, Fl., 1967), 44-47. Page references to this edition are given subsequently in the text.

26. “AN ELEGY UPON The Death of Mrs. A. BEHN; The Incomparable ASTREA. By a Young Lady of Quality,” in G. Thorn-Drury, ed., A Little Ark Containing Sundry Pieces of Seventeenth-Century Verse ([London], 1921), 53-57. Page references to this edition are given subsequently in the text.

27. Philaster goes on to suggest that Barker has replaced Philips.

28. Margaret Newcastle, Poems, And Fancies (London, 1653), sig. Aa2v (after 160).

29. Alexander Pope, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1956), 1:109-11.

30. Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt, vol. 4 of The Poems of Alexander Pope, 2d ed. (New Haven, Conn., 1953), 189-231. Page references to this edition are given subsequently in the text.

31. Miscellany Poems (Cambridge, 1697), 32-33. Page references to this edition are given subsequently in the text.

32. Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753), vol. 2 (Hildesheim, Germany, 1968), 157.

33. The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, N.C., 1942), 125.

34. Pylades and Corinna, 38-39. Cited in Poems, ed. Thomas, 34-35.

35. [Thomas Newcomb], Bibliotheca: A Poem. Occasion'd by the Sight of A Modern Library (London, 1712). Cited by R. K. Alspach in “The Matchless Orinda,” Modern Language Notes 52 (1937): 116-17. Page references to Newcomb's edition are given subsequently in the text.

36. Alexander Pope, Pastoral Poetry & An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, vol. 1 of The Poems of Alexander Pope (New Haven, Conn., 1961), 279-80.

37. Roger D. Lund defends Newcomb against charges of gender-bias, but he admits that Newcomb's “relative even-handedness disappears … in Newcomb's condescending satire on Philips's sex” (“Bibliotheca and ‘the British Dames’: An Early Critique of the Female Wits of the Restoration,” Restoration 12 [1988]: 103).

38. See Thomas, Poems, 31-33, for information on Philips's early eighteenth-century reception.

39. Though I am arguing that Newcomb's poem played a significant role in the decline of Philips's reputation, I do not mean to overstate its inherent power or influence. What effect Bibliotheca had on Philips's reception derived primarily from the prevailing hostility to literary “femininity,” and all that may have been needed to tip the critical scales against a particular woman poet was a single negative critique organized around issues of gender.

40. William Roberts, “Saint-Amant, Orinda, and Dryden's Miscellany,” English Language Notes 1 (1964): 195.

41. In Epistles, II.i, Pope notes: “Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet, / His moral pleases, not his pointed wit; / Forgot his Epic, nay Pindaric Art, / But still I love the language of his Heart” (Imitations, 201).