ABSTRACT

Friederike Brun is a kind of emblem for the cosmopolitan nature of European Romanticism, as well as a symbol of women's crucial and hitherto largely ignored participation in the republican and internationalist spirit of that moment in European history. This chapter explores the ways in which the refrain of Brun's brief lyric poem, "Ich denke Dein", written in 1792 and published in 1795, was reworked throughout the nineteenth century by a number of important British women poets, among them Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It offers a glimpse into the historical vicissitudes of the nineteenth-century European woman poet's complex and vexed relation to her audiences as she moves from cosmopolitan saloniere to voice of an imperial nation. The individual love affair is replaced by the love affair between poet and audience and the concern for the place in the beloved's heart by the self-conscious concern for poetic legacy.