ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some anxieties surrounding childbirth and the frequent demonization of the mother--important aspects of the cultural context in which mothers composed their child loss poetry--in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It explicates the culturally and historically specific thematic conventions for composing upon the occasion of child loss in early modern England. The chapter argues that mothers writing about their own experiences of child loss tend to choose a poetically self-effacing plain style. It uses Mary Carey's poetry as an example to demonstrate how some mothers' rejection of dominant poetic trends created an opportunity for them to develop and to invigorate the conventions of child loss poetry by simultaneously borrowing from and interrogating them. The chapter explicates mothers' dramatic revisions of the potentially one-dimensional, simplistic themes common to elegies for children. It also argues that Katherine Philips' child loss poems constitute an instructive exception to mother-poets writing about their own children create the illusion of their self-effacement as poets.
