Anna Letitia Barbauld Criticism, And Nonconformism In The British Romantic Era

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Anna Letitia Barbauld was the preeminent leader of female poets and the distinguished children’s writer in the British Romantic Period. Many contemporaries dispraised Barbauld simply because of her religion. She was born and raised in a nonconformist family, and she gradually became a dissenter. As Ralph Waldo Emerson sighed with emotion, “for nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasures. (1841:179)” Barbauld’s whole life was haunted by criticism and disapproval, her poems that expressed her political stand and religious beliefs were regarded as discard the classics and rebel against orthodoxy, or even worse, as heterodoxy. Her “Epistle to William Wilberforce” attacked British involvement in the slave trade, and her last major work “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” despairs over the war with France and the corruption of English consumer society. Barbauld’s negative comments on the country’s future stepped on a sensitive nerve and enraged the intellects who on the other hand supported the war and hold great expectation on British future. The Tory critic John Wilson Croker warned Barbauld “to desist from satire” by saying that: it was not up to a “lady-author” to sally forth from her knitting and say how “the empire might be saved.”(1812:49) The overwhelming lambasting forced Barbauld to escape from public spotlight, but it didn’t stop her from writing. Her bumpy life proved the truth quite impressive that women should not be underestimated as the domestic machine engaged in knitting and babysitting. Instead, they are emotional creatures whose imagination could run as wild as men’s.
3.1. Barbauld’s Emblem of Imagination
Washing-Day was written in 1797, technically a mature work for Anna Letitia Barbauld. It was labelled as ...

... middle of paper ...

...ing-Day, she put the domestic muses’ washing day to a place as severe as the Judgment Day, and burst Milton’s “bubble” through her own supplication of a muse to “sing the dreaded washing day.”(50) Both poems succeed in poking fun at not only Milton’s inflated tone in Paradise Lost, but also the male counterparts’ ferocious ambition. By challenging one of the most prominent male poets, Barbauld earned herself universal attention as well as overwhelming admiration from women.
In essence, Barbauld was brilliant in being fearless to speak out her feminist voice, innovate and enrich the interpretation of imagination. It is a great loss for the critics to overlook the outstanding contribution Barbauld made to diversify the Romantic Poetry on the grounds that literary world could only remain its vitality by keeping works of different schools and both sexes in full bloom.

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