Summary
Wilde opens by naming Elizabeth Barrett Browning as the one great poetess England has given the world. Swinburne would set Christina Rossetti beside her, calling her New Year hymn the noblest sacred poem in the language, but Wilde thinks this loyalty too generous: Miss Rossetti is 'a very delightful artist in poetry', which is rare, yet not everything. The only woman who can be named alongside Mrs. Browning is Sappho, the 'Poetess' of the Greeks, whose poems were burnt by emperor and pope and survive only as a few fragments, 'the echo of an echo'. Sappho was the more perfect artist, but her song is lost, and Wilde turns to the poet of The Cry of the Children, the Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh.
He quotes a poem in her honour by an unnamed writer to whom he owes his love of poetry and of country, and dwells on her life in Italy, where her passion for liberty helped, he says, the unity Dante had dreamed of. The chief qualities of her work are sincerity and strength. Her rhymes can be monstrous, but her ruggedness was deliberate, as her letters to Mr. Horne show: 'In her very rejection of art she was an artist.' She was a Platonist in philosophy and an Opportunist in politics, and quoting her own prefaces, Wilde calls her a Sibyl, wiser than the one Michael Angelo painted in the Sistine Chapel, because she knew that suffering is part of knowledge.
To her influence, almost as much as to the higher education of women, Wilde traces the great number of poetesses in his own time. He defends the value of tradition and careful culture, lists Mrs. Pfeiffer, Mrs. Meynell, Miss Nesbit, Jean Ingelow and others, and then wishes women would write more prose. Poetry is for our highest moods, prose for our daily bread, and English prose is detestable, with a few masters: Carlyle, who should not be imitated, Pater, who cannot be, Meredith, who is a warning, and Ruskin, whose music is unattainable.
The rest is a history. Wilde suggests the first English poetess was the Abbess Juliana Berners, who wrote on hawking, and moves through Anne Askew, Queen Elizabeth, the Countess of Pembroke, Elizabeth Carew and Lady Mary Wroth. After the Restoration come the Duchess of Newcastle, Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to make literature a profession, Katharine Philips and Lady Winchelsea, praised by Wordsworth. A long, teasing list follows, from Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Mrs. Chapone to L. E. L., 'Perdita' and Emily Bronte. Judged historically, Wilde concludes, these women had real talent, and since Mrs. Browning 'our woods have become full of singing birds'.