NN. Yes, but it is a recklessultimately a masculineoverthrowing, is it not? Splendid as Burns's love poetry isincluding his more genteel love poemshe cannot deliver the complex truths exposed in the sentimental styles developed (mainly) by women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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 | | "sentimental styles": Other than the ballad revival of the eighteenth century, no pre-Romantic movement was more important for Romanticism than sentimentalism. The aesthetics of sentimentalism are defined early in Mark Akenside's
Pleasures of Imagination
(1744). The Della Cruscan movement of the 1780s and 1790s provided the crucial immediate stimulus for the development of Romantic forms of the sentimental.
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Ridiculed as "unsex'd females" by reactionaries like Gifford, Matthias, and Polwhele, writers like Hannah Cowley turned female experience in the male world to a test of that world's hidden truths. In Cowley's "Departed Youth" (1797), for example, we see the birth of a new Venus from the wreck of her sixty-four-year-old body. The thefts of time are taken back in the poem's imperative to "Break the slim form that was adored / By him so loved, my wedded lord." The metaphysics of a Sternian sentimentality lead Cowley to exchange the body of her first natureadorable, married, passivefor a
vita nuova
:
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| | But leave me, whilst all these you steal,
The mind to taste, the nerve to feel.
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As in the rest of the poem, Cowley here breaks the slim forms of her earliest language. As generous as Burns ("my loved lord") and, if less vigorous, just as determined, her behavior preserves her inherited proprieties. "Departed Youth" invokes a whole series of favorite eighteenth-century terms and phrases from the lexicon of sensibility ("lively sense," "sentiment refined," ''taste," "nerve," "feel") only to reembody them through a series of syntactic and lexical wordplays. If the poetic style is different, the poetic demand is exactly like the one Yeats would make famous, in the poetry of
his
old age, a century and more later.
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Readers, especially twentieth-century readers, often miss what is happening in texts like these because they forget the conventions of a poetry written under the sign of what Shelley called "Intellectual Beauty." It is a sophisticated, an artificial signlike that fanciful nature you two have been playing with in your conversation. But Romantic nature, as you know, is an allegorical construct of urbane
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