“In our own blood drenched the pen”: Italy and Sensibility in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's last poems (1862)

Abstract

This article reconsiders on two counts the highly influential and eloquent interpretation of Barrett Browning's poetic engagement with the Risorgimento offered by Sandra Gilbert, who sees her personal and professional rejuvenation in direct correspondence with the Risorgimento. Firstly, her poetic response to Italian politics radically alters between her elopement to Italy in 1846 and her death in 1861, in contradistinction to Gilbert's static model. Secondly, Barrett Browning registers an extreme caution about her direct identification, as a woman poet, with Italy.

“What Is Historical Poetics?”

“…8 His description of Pan as "half-god half-brute" recalls her description of this classical figure: "Yet half a beast is the great god Pan," from "A Musical Instrument," published by EBB in Cornhill Magazine and edited after her death by Robert Browning for Last Poems (Barrett Browning 1860, 1862). But EBB is more explicitly critical of Pan, as various feminist critics have observed (e.g., Chapman 2003;Hurst 2015;Leighton 1992;Mermin 1989;Morlier 1999). While his poem is framed as an aesthetic form that represses a story of sexual violence by performing a poetic redaction, her poem tells the painful story of aesthetic mediation as a history of sexual violence.…”