Notes

1 John Stuart Mill’s famous distinction between the “overhearing” of “eloquence” and the “hearing” of “poetry” is of interest with regard to occasional poetry:

Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling: but, if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavoring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action. (348)

In his language, eighteenth-century occasional poetry must be regarded as “eloquence,” because it addresses a specific person for the purposes of influencing feeling, belief, or action.

 

2 Cavell’s actual term is “redemptive reading,” by which he means “letting ourselves be instructed by texts we care about” (51; 53).

3 Although scholars have long discounted the “secret marriage,” the relationship itself continues to provoke speculation. For a review of the dominant theories, see Barnett (32-59). My favorite comment on the relationship comes from Margaret Anne Doody: “Whether it is necessary to fathom the exact nature of relationships between other people, or inspect the sheets to see if there are signs of intercourse, is arguably both rude and unnecessary” (99). Whatever its exact nature, the relationship between Jonathan Swift and Esther Johnson was grounded in an intimacy we must accept if we are to hear the birthday poems as they were meant to be heard.

 

4 See McCarthy 77-79.

5 We do know that each poem was well received. Priestley, we believe, released the mouse (“Mouse’s Petition” 244n), and Stella copied her 1719 birthday poem into a “small quarto volume,” something she presumably would not have done had the poem displeased her (Swift, “Stella’s Birthday” 686n).

6 Richetti has continued his meditations on the subject, the topic of his current book-length project and the focus of his 2009 ASECS presidential address. For the past several years, as well, he has sponsored national and regional panels devoted to the recitation of eighteenth-century poetry and discussion about the process and experience of preparing a poem for oral delivery.

 

7 In this birthday poem, the “harmony” between spirit and body is still perceptible, but as the years go on, “the spirit within endures after the exterior begins to decay” (Paulson 308).

 

8 I would note that Swift, too, reports Stella’s inclination to fat as a received opinion, not necessarily his own.

 

9 In an email communication, 17 September 2010, William McCarthy confirmed that there is no evidence of Barbauld’s performing her own works—though he believes she did read “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” to an intimate circle of select family members and friends. As David Perkins has shown, however, for the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, “poetry was a strongly ‘temporal’ and oral art—an art realized in time by the voice” (“How the Romantics” 656).  People of this age performed poetry as a matter of course. Barbauld’s skill at doing so has been documented with regard to a work not her own (the ballad, “Lenore”). Her reading “electrified” her audience in Edinburgh—and made Walter Scott a poet, by his own account (qtd in McCarthy 364-65).

 

10 Holmes calls the poem “perhaps the first animal-rights manifesto ever written” (246n). His argument is offered speculatively in his book. An NPR segment on The Age of Wonder, however, presents the case more sentimentally, and definitively, by deeming “The Mouse’s Petition” an “early animal rights poem” (Krulwich). Tellingly, this segment, which includes an emotional reading of part of the poem by actress Anne Bobby, violates Barbauld by casting her into a subservient role with regard to Priestley. The narrative identifies her as her friend’s “lab assistant” and “a young wife and poet,” when, it was never her “job” in the Priestley household to clean the cages after the great scientist “pack[ed] up for the day,” and she would not marry until 1774.  Her relationship to both Priestley and his wife was that of friendship, not servitude; and one wonders why it would be important to note the fact that she was a “young wife” even if that had been the case.

 

[Click here to listen to NPR's segment on "The Mouse's Petition."]

 

For an interesting, and balanced, discussion of the “animal rights” significance of both Barbauld’s poem and another famous mouse poem, Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse,” see David Perkins (Romanticism and Animal Rights 8-11). See also Bellanca.

 

11 Barbauld makes a very similar argument in her poem “The Caterpillar” in which she describes her home as infested with the insects and her heart touched by the one she allows to live through the general devastation required by the laws of housekeeping.