Aurora Leigh (1857)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1830s, Carlyle, Browning, and Tennyson impelled to renunciation of subjectivity. “Close thy Byron (1818-21), open they Goeathe (18th),” Carlyle’s character in Sartor Resartus says. “I’ll look within no more.”
Tennyson’s “Palace of Art” and “Lady of Shallott”
Preface to Poems (1853) Arnold notes critic who says that “the poet who would really fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past, and draw his subjects from matters of present import.”
Clough: people much prefer Vanity Fair and Bleak House, and that for poetry ‘to be widely popular, to gain the ear of the multitudes” it would have to deal “more than at present with general wants, ordinary feelings, the obvious rather than the rare facts of human nature.”
Contemporary
p 24 I.700 get no good calculating profits
p 26 I 746 book is still the world
p 29 I 856 virtuous liars, dreamers after dark
p 152 V.203 throbbing age
page 152-3 V.220 this living art, presents an age
p41.II. Headache too noble…I choose headaches
p47.II.330 You think a woman ripens as a peach, on the cheeks chiefly
p.51.454 I too have a vocation
Anti-English
p 7 I.79 comfortable English scorn
p 13 I.280 Eyes of no color
p 13. I 300 bird in a cage
13 I.310-338 very kind
16 I.391 She liked my father’s child
p 20. I.530 Sighing was his gift
23. I.630 tied up fast..a park
p59.II.730 We’ll leave Italian manners
Romantic/Woman
9. I.150 mothers face, which kept the mystical level of all forms
19 I.506 natural wish to get away (Keatsian)
17. I 230 Coleridgean ship..ten nights ten nights
12. I.250 houses of fog…life in death (page 13)
18.I.487 Lime trees
14.I.320 Father: Love, Love my child.
18.I.470 My soul endured
20. I.55 He for worms, I for gods
p.31I.933 Such ups and downs have poets
p35.I.1070 Nature poet
p31.I.1030 My quickening inner life
p40.II.82 book in hollow by the stream
p.52.II.485 Life develops from within
p.53.II.510
Art/Woman/Byronic
p43II.180 So symnpathetic to the personal pang
p44II.213 A read haired child
p46.II.296 Mastodon