ABSTRACT
Homage poems to Elizabeth Barrett Browning by American women poets, celebrating her imaginative genius and bodily fragility, forged a transatlantic subgenre, the poetess praise poem. Tracing these many tributes sheds light on the history of Barrett Browning's contemporary reception as a monumental figure on both sides of the Atlantic, a figure represented as deanimated yet insistently present, and also on an Anglo-American network of poetesses and poems. Barrett Browning is an uncanny figure for influence and agency, incorporated into the homage poem as a haunting and tangible presence, appropriated into Anne C. Lynch Botta's very own poetic signature as the condition of her secondary echoic utterance. Barrett Browning circulates in their poetry as a haunting figure that subverts poetic will and authorial mastery but, ironically, also endows them with a secondary performative agency. For Barrett Browning represented not just a legendary figure, but also the potential to transform a sentimental feminized tradition of poetry into a more muscular public poetics.
