ABSTRACT
“With what enthusiasm do some set up Wordsworth for an idol, and others Shelley! But this taste is quite another feeling to that which creates; and the little now written possesses beauty not originality.” A little later, sustaining the note of lament for belatedness, Landon asks in the same essay, “On the Ancient and Modern Influence of Poetry” (1832), her fascinating parallel to aspects of Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (unpublished in her lifetime): “who could for a moment have hesitated as to whether a poem was marked with the actual and benevolent philosophy of Wordsworth, or the beautiful but ideal theory of Shelley?” 1 The essay’s implications are various. Landon clearly defines her age as one that has lost the “originality” of the heyday of Romantic poetry. But she hints at the advantages as well as the disadvantages of belatedness: able to hold in balance the relative merits of Wordsworth’s “actual and benevolent philosophy” and Shelley’s “beautiful but ideal theory,” Landon implies that the poetry of her predecessors opens itself to her own responsive appropriations. At the same time, her ways of suggesting the impoverishment of the present indicate a profoundly intertextual imagination, one saturated in the dominant tropes of the Romantic poets.
