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The current rapid expansion of the literary canon, brought about by a reconsideration of women writers and others writing in a tradition outside the privileged "mainstream," must raise questions about the critical canon as well. How useful in the discussion of such works are the labels devised to describe the products of a rival tradition? Must a new and separate critical idiom be invented before these newly canonized writers can be read, or can such an idiom be developed by modifying existing critical constructs? To what extent must such constructs be modified before they can be applied to the work of a woman poet without doing her or her poetry an injustice? For students of the Romantic period, one of the most influential of these critical constructs has been the form that M.H. Abrams derived after the fact to describe many famous lyrics by the male Romantics, a form Abrams christened the "greater Romantic lyric." "The First Fire," a subtle meditative poem by A.L. Barbauld that has been critically neglected, closely resembles some of the poems Abrams invented his "genre" to describe. (See the appendix for the full text of "The First Fire.") What tensions result when one applies Abrams's critical model to Barbauld's poem? The English poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) has lately been coming into her own. In 1984 Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg called her "one of the most neglected writers of her day....[A] far better poet than Anna Seward, she offers imaginative subjects, often portrayed with much humor."(1)
A handful of Barbauld poems have since been reprinted or discussed in articles and anthologies, though these have curiously failed to notice her most ambitious work, such as "The First Fire," or the important political poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.(2) In The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry-the first book-length critical examination of this period of women's poetry--Marlon Ross gives Barbauld something like her due.(3) His format allows Ross to discuss Barbauld at length: he dedicates a passage of sixteen pages to her exclusively and takes her into account in his discussions of her various contemporaries throughout the book. Ross is especially interested in Barbauld's "conception of female poeticizing" and the limits of her feminism (p. 217). The chief example...