Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (reading books for 6 year olds TXT) 📕

further out, toward the periphery permitted to angels, than Miss Barrett. Yet you would get a verdict of insanity upon her from any jury in Christendom.’ This oddly mixed message comes from the same pen as an anonymous front-page rave a couple of months earlier:

There will doubtless be criticism by Lowell and Poe—[…] of a certain new book, just published by the Langleys. It is, (as to style merely,) Tennyson, out-Tennysoned,—the last strain and tension of peculiarity and surprise—but withal brimfull of genius […] Mrs. Barrett is worth a dozen of Tennyson, and six of Motherwell—equal perhaps in original genius to Keats and Shelley. We wish we knew more of her.

Poe, a complex individual with a reputation for invention of all kinds, may merely be trying to stoke literary controversy. But positioning Elizabeth’s poetry is important. Something new is going on. Back in London, The Spectator makes its intelligent attempt in the month the book appears:

Miss Barrett is of the school to which MR COVENTRY PATMORE belongs, but with a happier choice in the selection of her subjects, more of skill in the use of her materials, a healthier moral tone, and less affectation, unless in her style and the occasional choice of her meter. […] The author whom MISS BARRETT immediately resembles is TENNYSON.

The piece goes on astutely to ascribe to her something close to the Picturesque culture with which she grew up:

representing things not as they really are, or as they are supposed to be, but with a peculiarity derived from the writer’s mind [her poems] excel in a species of quaint description, which is sometimes more effective than a natural style.

Other British reviews compare Elizabeth to Milton, Keats, Coleridge, Byron and Wordsworth. She’s being read against the entire English canon as well as against her peers. Yet still she remains a special case, set apart by gender. ‘We have no hesitation in saying that among the female poets of the day, MISS BARRETT stands at the head’, pronounces The Atlas. Worse, in Blackwood’s, Scottish metaphysician James Ferrier raps her over the knuckles for aspiring to the literary at all:

If she will but wash her hands completely of Aeschylus and Milton, and all other poets, […] and come before the public in the graces of her own feminine sensibilities […] her sway over human hearts will be more irresistible than ever, and she will have nothing to fear from a comparison with the most gifted and industrious of her sex.

Luckily, less antediluvian readers are to be found among her peers, the young poets who are giving each other a run for their money. A year ago John Kenyon let Elizabeth know that Robert Browning admired her poem ‘The Dead Pan’. When Poems appears, Browning is travelling in Italy; he left London the day before it was published. But on 10 January 1845, after he’s been home for just over a month, he reads a copy which Kenyon has sent to New Cross and writes to congratulate Elizabeth.

The letter he sends this short, dark winter day is an intimate expression of poetic kinship. Its ‘Aha!’ of recognising someone he’s never seen through her words alone is the basis for everything that follows. The feeling may be asexual, but his language is intemperate:

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—[… I]nto me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew. I can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought—but in this addressing myself to you, your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart—and I love you too.

For Elizabeth, no other kind of kinship could be more powerful. Her Preface to Poems restated how deeply personal her passion for poetry is:

Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing […] I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry […] I have done my work […]—not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being,—but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain.

Robert’s letter makes clear that he’s interested in her as a person too:

Do you know I was once not very far from seeing .. really seeing you? Mr Kenyon said to me one morning ‘would you like to see Miss Barrett?’—then he went to announce me,—then he returned .. you were too unwell—and now it is years ago—and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels—as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel or crypt, ..

But it’s his very first words that couldn’t be better pitched to speak directly to her poetic, which is to say her emotional, self. I love your verses with all my heart: in fact he probably has her at I love. Eighteen months from now, she will tell Robert that this word ‘was a disguised angel & I should have known it by its wings though they did not fly’. For, as she says to Miss Mitford, quoting Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Even when the object is not poetry, “I love love.”’

Elizabeth writes back to Robert the very next day, and her response is perfectly pitched in turn to draw him in. She asks him to critique her work: a lead none of her male correspondents has ever refused. And while drawing back within the shelter of propriety she carefully chooses words that mirror his own:

I thank you, dear Mr Browning, from the bottom of my heart. […] Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear—very dear to me: but the sympathy of a poet & of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me!

And though she havers, she finds