Women Romantic Poets - Volume 4

Summary

Who was the bestselling English poet of the nineteenth century? No, not Tennyson or Byron or Wordsworth—but Felicia Hemans (1793–1835), “the most considerable woman poet of the Romantic period” and “the most notable British poet flourishing between the death of Byron and the rise of Tennyson and the Brownings” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008). With an unfailing and seemingly effortless command of language, she voiced the deepest concerns of ordinary people, especially women, to an extent that no other writer of her time could do. The 106 poems in this collection range from the legends of Wales to the historical records of Greenland, and from the superstitions of ancient Babylon to her own personal struggles with desertion, loneliness, and fatal illness.