R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

The Women Poets of the 'Seventies 117come within the scope of this paper, your complaint willbe justified. So before you set me and my paper down asa complete fraud, may I say something in a general wayabout women and poetry? basing it all, to make it moreadmissible, on women and poetry in the 'seventies?First of all—and this is important—what men werewriting poetry in the 'seventies? The answer comes quickand obvious: Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Rossetti,William Morris, James Thomson; no need to mention anyminor names. It is clear from these names alone thatpoetry in England was alive. Pre-Raphaelitism, howevermuch out of fashion it may be to-day, and however unpopularcliques and coteries may be with those who standoutside them, existed as an armed force in the strongholdof Chelsea, a gathering of personalities to which even inour irreverent age we must still take off our hats. Awoman living in the 'seventies, then, stood a good chance:poetry in England was neither flagging nor stale; womensince the beginning of the century had set an example ofliterary activity; and, above all, the general emancipationof women, though resentfully derided by Mr Punch,had already progressed so far that he could no longerafford to ignore it. Notoriously, the English always turna danger into a joke. They have a theory that thatsystem diminishes the danger. Therefore, if Punch madejokes about the emancipation of women, it meant thatEnglish manhood at large was alarmed. I have alreadyadmitted, however, that there was no cause for alarm onthe part of the poets: their position was not in the leastdegree challenged by the poetesses. Perhaps this accountsfor the extravagant praises lavished on the poetesses bysome of the reviewers; Hartley Coleridge for instance,reviewing Mrs Clive's poems in the Quarterly—though alittle earlier, to be exact, than our date—said of themthat 'the stanzas printed by us in italics are, in our