ABSTRACT
In these excerpted poems, British writer Anne Finch (1661–1720) rejected Alexander Pope's (1688–1744) imputation that female playwrights wrote in “hysteric fits,” instead claiming that her inspiration came from “spleen.” In fact, Finch's poem (1701, rev. 1709) describing an attack of spleen became a contemporaneous physician's authoritative description of the disease, which was linked to melancholy. Spleen's importance to Finch reflected her era's mechanistic answer to the perennial philosophical question of the relationship between the mind and the body, which also animated debates in dramatic theory at the time.
