E441101B. Poems (1844).
The Sun, 1 November 1844, p. 2.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 373-374.
Blackwood’s Magazine.
Miss Elizabeth Barrett’s recently published volume of poems—which we noticed a few weeks since in The Sun—forms the subject of a judicious and eloquent criticism in the present Number of this periodical. The Reviewer justly remarks:—“If the poetess does not always command our unqualified approbation, we are at all times disposed to bend in reverence before the deep-hearted and highly-accomplished woman—a woman whose powers appear to us to extend over a wider and profounder range of thought and feeling than ever before fell within the intellectual compass of any of the softer sex.” This is high praise, but it is not undeserved. Indeed, we will go even further, and say that in Miss Barrett’s poems there are frequent evidences of a truer and deeper sensibility than has ever yet been exhibited by any female writer in the language. In all she writes, she writes evidently from the heart. There is no straining after effect—no hunting about for startling or novel imagery. She contents herself for the most part with the simplest and most obvious forms of expression; never writes for mere writing’s sake, but comes to a halt the instant she has fully expressed and exhausted the feeling of the moment. As we admire Mrs. Hemans for the exquisite polish of her language, and Miss Landon for her force and brilliancy, so we admire Miss Barrett for the depth and purity and sacredness of her feeling. Her poem of “Bertha in the Lane” is, of its kind, the truest to the human heart of any in the language, and we defy any one to read it without being deeply moved by its impassioned sensibility. Alluding to this lady’s imitations occasionally of the classical writers, the Reviewer says, “The purity of their diction, and nothing else, has been their passport to immortality.” Surely this is a most unjust dictum! Is there nothing we admire in the Medea of Euripides, or the Œdipus Coloneus of Sophocles, but the purity of their diction? Does the Reviewer forget the incomparable tenderness of sentiment shown in the closing scenes of the one; or the majestic sublimity that characterises the whole description of the passing away of the aged Œdipus from earth in presence of his daughter, amid the gloom of that mysterious grove where the awful voice of destiny alone breaks on the awful stillness of the hour? Again, do we admire nothing in the gay, convivial, worldly Horace— the fanciful and luxuriant Ovid—or the subtle, metaphysical Lucretius, but the “purity of their diction?” It is not by their style alone that authors gain immortality, but by their thoughts and sentiment; and it is for their excellence in these respects, as well as for the graces of their language, that we still pay willing homage to the genius of the great writers of antiquity.
[The review concludes with comments on the balance of the periodical.]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
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