today's poem

[angevin2]

Which riffs on yesterday's, somewhat. Hooray intertextuality!

An Answer to Another Persuading a Lady to Marriage
Katherine PhilipsForbear, bold youth, all's heaven here

Comments

[rem_chan]

That's radical and wonderful.

[angevin2]

Katherine Philips is fantastic. Here is more of her stuff; there is a bio here which I highlight mostly because the second section is really irritating (it dismisses her poetry as insufficiently intellectual and insufficiently homoerotic, and assumes that she didn't really have much to say).

[so_lily_briscoe]

Sad! I, too, heart Katherine Philips. Do you know of a good, affordable modern edition? Amazon reveals only expensive facsimile type stuff, and one out of print University of Wales edition.

Also, Germaine Greer, you freaking idiot, "meeting of souls and never of flesh" -- have you read John Donne? Do you have any idea how sex works in this particular lyrical framework? Grah. I hate bad readers, I do, and bad feminists even more.

[angevin2]

I don't think there is one, which sucks; she's always in the anthologies of early modern women's writing, but there is a lot of neat stuff she wrote that's not usually in them. (Did you know that she wrote a poem about the Welsh language?)

Agreed about Germaine Greer. Metaphysical sex is BRAIN SEX. I think Philips' reputation has suffered from being considered Much More Decorous than Aphra Behn, and thus Not Very Interesting. (Actually, it's totally the early modernist lit-crit analogue of the "can women who like dresses/makeup/penises be good radical feminists" question. Heh. I mean, the relevance of penises to a discussion of Philips' poetry is debatable, but you know what I mean.)

[liseuse]

I wrote my second year C17 exam on Katherine Phillips and haven't read a word by her since. This, therefore, was lovely to see pop up on my flist.

[anatomiste]

I too haven't read any Philips for too long, thanks!!

[orts]

Shouldn't that be "More bright and large than his"?

[speak_me_fair]

That's a wonderful poem. I particularly like the second verse - and the tone throughout!