Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

Genre: occasional poems, written for friends and to celebrate events and places she loved.

Characters: she uses the "men" and "women" of her time, generalized in a pattern we are becoming familiar with in the works of Bacon, Hobbes, Behn, and Astell.  In effect, the great debate which began in Canterbury Tales is taken up again in the late seventeenth century.  Also, Finch uses classical and biblical references to contextualize her discussion, seeing herself in the line of poets coming from David (Psalms) through Deborah (Judges 4-5).

Summary:  "The Introduction" to her Miscellany Poems (1713) never was published with them, probably due to its direct challenge to the male-dominated literary scene of her time.  Her self-censorship in fear of public condemnation became a casebook example for feminist critics of the 'sixties and 'seventies who sought to explain why women weren't published more often.  Those women were in fact writing, but they knew their work could be condemned or ignored (worse yet!) merely for being "by a woman writ" (7), perhaps her most famous single phrase.  The chilling spectacle of a competent, perhaps even great poet turning her back on publication and the chance to shape the English language reaches its peak in lines 59-64 in which she directly echoes Milton while rejecting the great poetic gesture for a deliberately lesser effect.

"A Nocturnal Reverie" demonstrates what technique and vision were lost when Finch rejected an active publishing career.  Striking off from the thrice repeated echo of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the poem forms 25 heroic couplets that sinuously evoke the marvelous but hard to distinguish virtues of a night vision.  The transition words all are time-indicators ("When," "Whilst," "While," "Till," etc.) but the flow of time is not distinct and is marked only by a sliding of one sensory impression into another.   The wind's sounds, the moonlit colors, the smells of the vanished day's flowers, and the combined sounds, colors and smells of the animals that populate the countryside are serially evoked to create a synaesthetic (sense-blending) experience.  

To read the full text of Finch's 1713 Miscellany Poems, click here.  This web page at the "Celebration of Women Writers" site also contains links to excerpts from the 1903 edition of Finch's work which contains the poems Finch withheld from the 1713 edition, as well as poems from the Wellesley Manuscript, which was edited and published by Jean M. Ellis D'Allessandro in 1988.

Issues and Research Sources:

1. How does Finch use poetic allusion to establish her relationship to the English literary tradition and, through it, to the classical tradition of Europe?  Having done that in poems intended not for the public eye, what would be the effect upon the reader of encountering them in a manuscript collection?
2. How could you compare Finch's defense of her poetic art with the Wife of Bath's or Amelya Lanyer's justification of their own right to a voice?  Particularly, how does she balance the English Christian literary tradition against the secular drives that animate her?
3. Read carefully Finch's poetic-creation-as-flight metaphor in her cancelled "Introduction" (ll. 59-64 on p. 2293).  Compare it with Milton's introduction to Book I of Paradise Lost,(ll.12-16 on p. 1818) and with "Mercury and the Elephant," her own revised introduction for the 1713 edition.  How has Finch negotiated her "anxiety of influence" with respect to the male poetic tradition?  What poetic strategies does she use in the published poem that she does not use in the manuscript poem, and what effect does that have on her poetic persona's "voice."
4. "Nocturnal Reverie" might be said to inaugurate a major movement in English poetry designed to evoke the countryside and the subtle sensory experiences one finds there for an audience of city dwellers.
   • How might this relate to the pastoral mode which we have encountered earlier in Mary Herbert's work?
   • Examine the poem's grammatical structure very carefully--how many sentences are used to compose it?  What kind of game is the poem playing with the reader's attention span?
   • The evocation of "Something, too high for syllables to speak" (l. 42) anticipates the cultural influence of a concept known to the next century's poets as "the sublime," from the classical Latin work (attributed, falsely, to Longinus), known as "On the Sublime" (Peri hupsos).  The "sublime" poetic work seeks to create effects in readers' minds that exceed those produced by the powers of ordinary language.  Is this possible?  The pursuit of this quality becomes a major topic and task of eighteenth-century poets, and also influenced the English Romantics, especially  Wordsworth.
5. Other sites which offer scholarly editions of previously unpublished works by women who wrote during the Renaissance, Restoration, and 18th century include the Brown University Women Writers Project, and the Emory Women Writers Resource Project at Emory University's Lewis H. Beck Center.  The Brown site has an exceptionally large text base of edited Renaissance women writers, and the Emory site's strength is its unedited (as in previously unpublished) texts.  These are being used as part of Emory's graduate program to teach editing practices.  To see Professor Sheila Cavanagh's very well-explained set of instructions for how a scholarly edition is prepared, and a well-equipped set of scholarly tools (paper and online), click here.

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