ABSTRACT
During the Romantic period (and before and after) it was not uncommon for male and female writers to address poems to each other, to assume and deny influence by the other, to dictate to, chastise, and praise the other. In this chapter, I will be exploring the cultural and poetic significance of a series of poems taking as their subject other poets. 1 They construct a species of poetic conversations based on an implicit recognition of the inevitability of influence. Poetry is made from the living bodies of contemporaries, or based on the new graves of immediate forerunners, and anxious self-preservation is transmuted into efforts at (re)placement - the self in the place of the other. A particular type of memory is involved when poets simultaneously invoke and erase their contemporaries. They ask their readers to remember and to forget, all at once; they depend on a willing suspension of memory that allows for the rewriting of poetic figures often already more established than their own. And they rely on a kind of collusion that is ready to supply the missing information: so that Hemans, for example, can invite her readers to believe in the Wordsworth or the Tighe with which she provides them, even as they draw on their own memories. The new poet — Hemans, Landon, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Barrett Browning — does not war with her or his subject, but rather pieces that subject together. As they re-member their sub-ject-poets, then, the writing poets displace the actual, render it unreal, poetical. Memories of poets past and present are transmitted to the readers of the present and the future: the scene of influence is staged between the writing poet and her or his audience. How memory, representation, and a kind of directed interpretation function is the machinery that underpins this chapter. Its workings are the poems that cast their title-subjects as fodder for poetry and supplant their texts and reputations with the writing poets own. 2
