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ANNE KILLIGREW. ''My Rare Wit Killing Sin": Poems of a Restoration Courtier, ed. Margaret J. M. Ezell. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2013. Pp. xv + 165. $27.95 (paper).
Published within months of her death from smallpox in June 1685, the Poems of Anne Killigrew have until recently attracted attention chiefly for Dryden's celebrated Pindaric ode memorializing her short career as a poet and painter. Many Dryden scholars have found Killigrew's poetry itself to be of negligible interest. Even Ms. Ezell makes modest claims for the literary merits of Killigrew's work, arguing that ''the single posthumously published volume of Killigrew's poems, therefore, should be viewed not so much as a final polished product . . . but as a record of the aspirations and poetic vision of a developing young artist'' finding her voice. In her introduction, Ms. Ezell situates Killigrew within the network of a ''family of courtiers'' strongly loyal to the Stuarts, both during the Interregnum and after the Restoration. It is one of the ironies of Killigrew's life that her birth in 1660 and death in 1685 should have spanned so precisely the twenty-five-year reign of Charles II, making her an exemplary Restoration writer. In some other respects, however, Killigrew's was a dissident voice: her poetry is markedly feminocentric in opposition to the masculinist libertine culture that prevailed at court; idealistic and contemptuous of ''worldly joys'' in an atmosphere of cynical pleasure seeking; and strenuous in advocating a life of...