Barbauld: “Embryo Systems and Unkindled Suns”

Abstract

Recognition and comprehension of Anna Barbauld’s use of astronomy drives to the heart of uncovering astronomy’s crucial, but insufficiently explored influence on Romantic poetry. Barbauld’s poetry produced during this time period is probably the best example of the interrelationship of astronomy, the practice of navigation and its relationship to empire, and the development of the Romantic poetic imagination. The seductive notion of understanding the solar systern and demystifying the very heavens (as well as their own world through exploration) take shape in the Romantic poetic imagination as the imaginative journey of the soul outward in nature and its return to the corporeal. M.H. Abrams, in his classic study “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” defines this genre of Romantic poem thus:

It begins with the description of a landscape visited in maturity, evokes the entire life of the poet as a protracted meditation on things past, and presents the growth of the poet’s mind as an interaction with the natural milieu by which it fostered, from which it is tragically alienated, and to which in the resolution it is restored, with a difference attributable to the intervening experiences; the poem ends at the time of its beginning. (530)