Conclusion. Felicia Hemans, the Della Cruscans and the Great Forgetting

Abstract

Ever mindful of the importance of her public image, Felicia Hemans did not wish to be associated with the female poets that were, by the time she wrote this letter to James Simpson (author and friend of Walter Scott), indelibly linked to Della Cruscanism. For Hemans, the rather whimsical name chosen for her by her parents in 1793 at the height of the fad for all things Della Cruscan was a liability linking her to a movement that had become by 1819 little better than a convenient “target for all the arrows of satire.” Hemans’ determination to bid her Della Cruscan name “wholly good-bye” is a rejection of the transgressive poetics associated with women like Mary Robinson and Charlotte Dacre from a younger poet who was every bit as attuned to the particular tastes of the contemporary literary marketplace as her famous predecessors. Hemans disavows the women who proceeded her in order to make space for a new type of popular poetry to emerge—a poetry wary of the eroticism, hedonism, and passion characteristic of the poetry of the Della Cruscans. The vehicle for the publication of this new type of poetry was not the fashionable newspaper but newly powerful media forms such as the periodical, the literary annual, and specialist literary newspapers like William Jerdan’s Literary Gazette (1817–1863).