ABSTRACT
Anna Barbauld’s ‘To a Little Invisible Being who is Expected Soon to Become Visible’ is perhaps the most anthologized British Romantic poem on maternity, and the least representative. Critics as different as Jerome McGann and Julie Kipp have read the poem metaphysically. For McGann, in The Poetics of Sensibility, it is ‘a poem about poetry’ which is ‘pregnant with the reality it celebrates’. McGann emphasizes that ‘Barbauld’s perceived inability to control this process of energies becomes a poetic figure of a new kind of artist (one who “watches and receives”)’, but I would take issue with the novelty here, as well as the sublimation of birth into metapoetry; this kind of organicist view is standard from at least the mid-eighteenth century onward, as in (to cite a major example) Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). For Kipp, in Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic, Barbauld’s poem communicates the mother’s ‘captivation’ by the child; she is alienated from herself in pregnancy, yet the child mirrors her own subjectivity. 1 Though interpretations centred on the creation of self and art fit nicely with traditional concerns of Romanticism, and thus make the poem eminently anthologizeable and teachable, both McGann and Kipp misread the poem at a basic level. Both assume the speaker is the mother, despite the use of the third person, and without biographical qualms: Barbauld never gave birth. 2 But it is not writing from lack of personal experience that makes Barbauld’s poem unusual. Many of her contemporaries wrote on maternity, even taking on mothers’ voices, before, or without, having children of their own, for instance, her friend Joanna Baillie (whom McGann pairs with Barbauld in his discussion).
