“Blest Contemplation's Placid Friend”

The Moon as a Mighty Confidante in the Works of Romantic Women Poets and Beyond

Abstract

The article inspects the unduly overlooked literary output of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century female poets, focusing chiefly on the innovative aspects of their Moon representations. The lunar poetry of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Tighe, and Felicia Hemans relies partly on past conventions while bravely departing from traditional representations and seeking new directions. In their works, the Moon becomes the site for synthesising not only the past and present but also light and darkness, reason and fancy, beauty and sublimity, science and myth, coldness and congeniality. The pieces seem to fit neatly into the concept of Feminine Romanticism, as coined by Anne K. Mellor, espousing a deconstruction of hierarchies between the subject and Nature. However, the analyses of the Moon motif in these poems may shed light on how Mellor’s framework could be reconsidered and extended.