"Manly Sweetness": Katherine Philips among the Neoclassicals

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 131.91. When Katherine Philips's posthumous Poems appeared in 1667, the volume included prefatory verses by Abraham Cowley celebrating her asEngland's esteemed "Woman Laureat."l Few at the time dissented from Cowley's assessment, and many-some of them prominent writers -agreed.2 By now, however, as critic Harriette Andreadis remarked in 1989, the "acclaim of [Philips's] contemporaries has . . . worn very thin": at best she has a poem or two in anthologies, representing a minor link between metaphysical and neoclassical poetry; at worst, critics disparage her work as "florid," "cajoling," or overly "fluent."3 No one has yet adequately accounted for the decline in Philips's literary fortunes.4 When did this decline occur? What was the nature of her original reception? What were subsequent views of her work like?5 How did different senses of her poetry evolve? My essay attempts to answer these kinds of questions. I locate the decline in Philips's reputation in the eighteenth century, and I account for it by charting the interplay between changes in the reception of her poetry and changesespecially as these involve questions of gender-in neoclassical literary aesthetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6In the course of my discussion, I identify three major phases in Philips's reception. The first spanned the 1650s and 1660s. The many writers who applauded Philips's works during these years did so in the gendered terms provided by contemporary neoclassical literary aesthetics, paying particular attention to what they described as the "masculine" strength and "feminine" sweetness of her verses. The second phase occurred in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 259 This content downloaded from 131.91.169.193 on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 21:44:19 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLYThough enthusiasm for Philips's poetry continued to be expressed during these years, a reworking of the central concepts of neoclassical poetics dramatically altered the gender-configurations of the terms used to describe her poems. As a consequence, readers who praised her writings at this time did so by focusing exclusively on what they perceived to be the masculine qualities of her writing. The third phase began while the second was still in progress. At the height of the laudatory and "masculine" period in Philips's reputation, a certain Thomas Newcomb used the prevailing preference for literary masculinity against her and condemned her poetry as being irredeemably feminine. Arising from and speaking to an aesthetics hostile to what a contemporary characterized as "Feminine Expression" of any kind,7 Newcomb's critiq...