Author: HEMANS (Felicia):
Title: The Forest Sanctuary: With Other Poems. The Second Edition, with Additions.
Description: Edinburgh: William Blackwood. And T. Cadell, London. MDCCCXXIX. 1829. 12mo, 172 x 107 mms., pp. vii [viii blank], 324, contemporary calf, gilt border on covers, spine ornately gilt in compartments, olive morroco label; bind ing slight worn and joints creased but a very good copy with a later annotation in pencil on the front free end-papers. Felicia Dorothea Browne (1793–1835) learned to speak several languages as well as Latin when she was very young. She published her first book, Poems, in 1808, followed by The Domestic Afflictions in 1812, the same year that she marrieg Captain Alfred Hemans. The Forest Sanctuary (1825) was her last long poem, and, as Nanora Sweet records in her Oxford DNB entry, it "was inspired by the protestant conversion of the Anglo-Spanish émigré priest Joseph Blanco White." Sweet adds, "With twenty volumes and nearly four hundred poems published in magazines and annuals during her lifetime, Felicia Hemans was the most considerable woman poet of the Romantic period. Her work was republished frequently in Britain and America until the First World War, almost yearly through the mid-nineteenth century. Hemans's poetry ranged formally from sonnets and lyrics to narratives, dramas, and even polemics. Some readers find her floral and topographical language and frequent allusions to history and literature purely decorative, while others propose that these elements reflect a systematic and critical study of politics and gender. Hemans's characteristically insistent rhythm and insinuating tone appear to support the latter argument, as do her pointed revisions of sources such as the work of Gibbon or Byron." I will add that, as a boy, I read her poem beginning "The boy stood on the burning deck...," and tried to memorize it, without having the least idea who she was. It has, of course, inspired many parodies, which were more to my taste in my later years, particularly one about the one about the boy playing cricket on the burning deck.

Keywords: poetry women literature


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