University of Virginia Library

2. APPENDIX 2: "Sonnet to the Rev. Richard Polwhele," by Anna Seward

The second half of the eighteenth century brought about a marked shift in the conception of literary address and literary audience; poets stopped addressing wealthy patrons, and, increasingly, began to address one another. "Circles" and "acquaintanceships" were the most common form of discourse; intertextuality — dialogue — was the order of the day. Never has there been a time when "literary society" has been so dominating a structure, perhaps because at this time both aspects of the term were at a peak. Prior to this time, the society to which so many Renaissance and Restoration poets belonged was not exclusively literary; after this time, the dawn of the mass audience, and the proliferation of writers in all social classes ended any sense of a close-knit society.

Given all this, it is important to note that the dialogue between Polwhele and his adversaries, as well as that between Polwhele and his ostensible allies, was an extremely onesided one. His main adversary, Wollstonecraft, could not defend herself, of course; but of the myriad of other writers mentioned in The Unsex'd Females, the only direct respondent appears to have been Mathias, who evidently added a "contemptuous" mention of Polwhele to a subsequent edition of The Pursuits of Literature. The only other writer willing to enter any sort of dialogue with Polwhele is Anna Seward. Her "Sonnet," admittedly, is not a defense of The Unsex'd Females; it is a defense of The Influence of Local Attachment, a poem first published by Polwhele in 1796, with a second edition in 1798 and probably two more thereafter. The sonnet certainly appeared before 1799, when it was included in Seward's volume of Original Sonnets, but it is unclear whether it refers to the first or second edition. This is unfortunate, since it would helpful to know whether Seward's poem appeared before or after the composition of The Unsex'd Females. Still, the presence of this poem only underscores the overwhelming absence of others; it appears that Polwhele was considered a marginal writer by both those who shared his values and those who did not. In an era of circles, Polwhele appears to have been somewhat out of the loop. The text of the poem has been taken from The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, ed. Sir Walter Scott, (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1810). It should also be noted that Seward is evidently attempting an homage in style; this sonnet is the only one of Seward's poems in the Scott edition to have a footnote attached.

That ingenious and learned gentleman had seen his charming Poem absurdly and arrogantly criticised by one of the periodical Censors. Amidst other utterly groundless objections, he accused the poet of unlicensed and affected verbalism, instancing particularly the words slumberous, and memorize. For both, Johnson shews the high authority of Shakespear, Milton, and Pope; and for the latter, a prose sentence of eminent beauty by Wotton, thus: — "Let their lives, which were bravely lost, be memorized on the full tablets of time." After accusing Mr. Polwhele of affectation in using them, the critic proceeds to assert that such expressions have the effect of a November fog, in completely annihilating every thing like sense and beauty in a composition. Now, it is evident, that were they as unhappily, as, in fact, they are happily used, their mal-influence could extend only to the sentence in which they are found; and since he cannot deny that they are clearly intelligible, at least, it is impossible they can have the obscuring effect of a fog, even upon that single sentence. The critic who could use such an inapplicable metaphor in prose, is miserably incompetent to sit in judgment upon poetry, and under the proud name too of the BRITISH CRITIC. By the same decider was the author of these poems accused of rendering several of her passages nonsense by the use of the word thrill: The following were some of the lines instanced. Speaking of Roubilliac's glorious monument in Wrexham Church, she says,

This critic must be poorly read in Milton, Pope, and Gray, and indeed, in all our best poets, since in them he might repeatedly find the word thrill used in the same sense. Johnson thus defines it as a verb active, "to thrill, to pass with a shuddering sensation. " Our hearts, or our memory may certainly be thrilled either by pleasure, pain, surprise, or terror, and so, in the language of poetry, may the tomb, the air, and other things, which are literally inanimate. — Milton says, in his hymn on the nativity,