ABSTRACT
Examining the work of three female poets, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Elizabeth Carter, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, this chapter traces their engagement with the sublime cosmography of John Milton’s poetry. It analyses the way they lay claim to Milton’s universe, expanding and revising it to suit their own devotional needs as well as the emergence of Newtonian physics. It argues that their poems draw from Milton to develop a tradition here termed ‘the devotional sublime’, a way of surveying God’s works and asserting the poet’s authority from within the confines of the private sphere. Asserting the female poet’s command of the cosmos in defiance of the contextualisation of astronomy as part of the male-inflected public sphere, Rowe, Carter, and Barbauld have a strong claim to being among the ‘hidden figures’ of English poetry.
