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Conventionality
and the Poetess
Another key way in which Sentimentist poetics differs from the poetics
of Romantic tradition is in the poetess's attitude towards the stylistic
choices of conventionality and artificiality. Mandell remarks that,
while for a poet such as Wordsworth it was a point of honor to defamiliarize
ordinary language, the poetess did not have the benefit of Wordsworth's
education. For the poetess, as for writers of lower social class,
highly conventional and even clichéd poetic diction could function
as a value, a sign of education and culture. Thus, not only is
poetesses' poetry open to simple meters and conventional diction;
it also evinces a conscious comfort with artificiality in general.
Often, artificiality can be seen in the use of metaphor and conceit.
For example, none of Lydia Sigourney's nature poems transforms
natural objects in the service of the poetess' own concerns, unless
they make it clear that that is what they are doing. Such clarity
is often attained through the use of those exaggerated figures which
have given poetesses' poetry the epithet "artificial."
The consciousness of artificiality is developed to great complexity
near the end of Sigoruney's "Autumn," where several of
the poem's symbols explicitly explain their own significance to
the poetess. Sigourney places the words spoken by the symbols in
quotes:
"We
are symbols, ye say, of the hastng doom
Of youth, and of health, and of beauty's bloom,
When Disease, with a hectic flush cloth glow,
And Time steal on with his tress of snow."
Not only do the symbols describe their own meaning to the poetess;
the phrase "ye say," which Sigourney has them address
to her, indicates an additional level of selfconsciousness. The
words emphasize that the symbolism occurs in the poetess' mind alone,
and that the symbols do not seem to represent a truth outside the
text of the poem. In other words, the poetess herself is aware that
the meanings she sees in nature are constructed ones. This fact
is not hidden in any way, but is one of the most apparent aspects
of the poem. As a result, this poem cannot be deconstructed in
the same terms as a romantic Iyric; the reader in a sense has nothing
at all to lose by seeing through the arbitrariness of the poem's
imaginary meanings, since the arbitrariness is built into the poem's
most accessible surface. This point is reinforced by the poet in
the line, "Yet ye stillhave a voice to the musing heart,/Tree,
Stream and Rose...". When the symbols proceed to give a moral
at the end of the poem, it is clear that this metaphorical moral,
"The
soul that admits in an evil hour
The breath of vice to its sacred bower
Will find its peace with its glory die,
Like the fading hues of an autumn sky."
is
not any extra‑textual truth but only a further continuation
of the poetess' very selfconscious musing. But, by putting the poem's
meanings and morals into the voices of the natural objects rather
than into her own voice, Sigourney has managed simultaneously to
make it clear that all the meanings in the poem are obviously her
own fictions and to avoid the subjective self that would be created
if she were to draw these conclusions in a central human voice.
Like the lack of a central subject-speaker, the choices of conventional
diction, simple meters, and artificial conceits doomed the poetesses
during the twentieth century to the invisibility of the supposed
"sentimental." Conventionality is, after all, the most
instantly recognizable aspect of sentimentality and, in our age
of aggressive individualism and the pursuit of novelty, the easiest
to despise. Sentimental conventionality involves transparent language,
familiar figures, and an underlying conviction of artificiality
that not only renders a lyric familiar and accessible, but also
marks it as part of the larger literary and social community.
It is hard to recall now, in the age that has been so dominated
by post-Romanticism, that originality was not always a key value
in poetry. In many eras, including the ancient world, the Renaissance,
and the Englightenment, it was more important for a poet to capture
a conventional idea with skill than to break new ground. In order
to read the work of the poetesses in its own terms, it is similarly
necessary to set aside post-Romantic and post-New Critical assumptions
that originality and innovation in language and concept are axiomatic
poetic values.
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