Letitia Elizabeth Landon, or L. E. L. as she was known to the public, occupies the hinterland between Romantic and Victorian poetry, and this section offers comments on a few of her lyrics. Publishing her first poem in 1820 at the age of eighteen, the year before Keats’s death, Landon, like Hemans who also published her mature work post‐1820, seems to belong to a third generation of Romantic poets.1 Publishing her first poem, ‘Rome’, in the Literary Gazette, and more poems in the same journal in 1821, Landon also enjoyed the prestige of being the chief reviewer of the journal. Though her first collection of poetry, The Fate of Adelaide: a Swiss Tale of Romance; and other Poems, published under her own name, went largely without comment, her subsequent 1824 collection, The Improvisatrice, and other Poems, published under the mysterious and tantalizing nom de plume of L. E. L., was very popular, running to six editions in its first year. Along with Felicia Hemans, Landon’s earnings propelled her to the top of the financial list in the 1820s and 1830s, with Paula Feldman noting the parity between Hemans and Landon in terms of their monetary success.2 Publishing more poetry collections, including The Troubadour: Poetical Sketches of Modern Pictures, and Historical Sketches in 1825, followed by The Golden Violet (1827) and The Venetian Bracelet (1829), Landon also edited several annuals. She also began to write novels, including her Romance and Reality (1831), which garnered some approving critical notices. Despite her impressive earnings, money remained a source of difficulty throughout her life, and, like Felicia Hemans, the pressure to be a financially as well as creatively successful poet shaped her poetic practice.
Despite an obvious resemblance to Felicia Hemans, Landon most closely recalls Byron, owing to the scandal that surrounded her, and to her interest in the role of the self in her poetry. Jerome McGann draws out this similarity, referring to her (along with Edgar Allan Poe) as ‘a second‐order Byron’.3 But this diminishes her considerable achievement. Landon’s poetry drips with references to secret romances, romantic misery, and abandonment, choosing to focus on erotic love unlike Hemans’s poetry of ‘domestic and maternal love’.4 Like Byron, Landon tried to disavow biographical readings, but she was equally unsuccessful at repelling prurient interest, which was compounded by her status as an independent female poet. Though Landon continually experimented with the self in her poetry, such experimentation is not in the simply autobiographical sense that her early critics believed. Rather, Landon deliberately works with the parameters of the self, blending a wry detachment with effusions of feeling so as to create poetry that both participates in and challenges the self’s emotional responses to pain. Self‐consciousness, rather than crippling her work, offers her a means with which to figure the self.
Glennis Stephenson argues for Landon as a highly self‐conscious poet fascinated by the role of the poet to the extent that she seems a ‘relentlessly Romantic’ poet, even more so than her male predecessors.5 Where Stephenson sees the role of the female poet as limiting, for Daniel Riess, ‘Her poetry did not simply acquiesce in the increasing commodification of literature and art; rather, it was an active, willing participant’.6 Femininity is, in the poetry, a means for self‐fashioning, much as Byron made use of a version of masculinity and heroism to create his poetry. Landon’s poetry explores femininity as a gilded cage as she exposes both its imprisoning quality and its aesthetic potential. In ‘Love’s Last Lesson’, she meditates through the speaker who acts as another ‘I’ for her to inhabit. Opening with a love letter, the poem begins with an insight into the agony of a woman whose lover has abandoned her and her letter to him. But Landon reframes this rejection as a means for considering the act of writing:
She flung aside the scroll, as it had part
In her great misery. Why should she write?
What could she write? Her woman’s pride forbade
To let him look upon her heart, and see
It was an utter ruin;—and cold words,
And scorn and slight, that may repay his own,
Were as a foreign language, to whose sound
She might not frame her utterance. Down she bent
Her head upon an arm so white that tears
Seem’d but the natural melting of its snow,
Touch’d by the flush’d cheek’s crimson; yet life‐blood
Less wrings in shedding than such tears as those. (61–72)
If, as a biographical reading would have it, she writes to bare her heart, these lines compellingly dismiss the idea. Pride prevents self‐exposure of a simplistic kind, even between former lovers. Self‐preservation demands withdrawal, but the problem of language continues as Landon’s speaker will not return the tenor of her lover’s ‘cold words’, unable and unwilling to speak in the ‘foreign language’ and ‘scorn and slight’ that colour his speech. McGann views such lack of emotional revelation as showing Landon’s careful mode of self‐exposure, claiming: ‘Landon had to negotiate her way with great care and deliberation. The consequence is a (socially) self‐conscious style of writing that often – especially in the later work – comes inflected with a disturbing mood or tone of bad faith. Again and again the poetry seems oblique, or held in reserve, or self‐censored.’7 Yet, within the poetry, such reserve accords with Byron’s deliberate silencing of his heroes. Lara, the Giaour, and countless Byronic hero‐figures increase their mystery in direct proportion to their speechlessness, and Landon creates intensity out of what her speaker refuses to say. Landon knowingly creates an aestheticized image of feminine anguish to appeal to her reader.
At the same time, seemingly insisting on her purpose as higher than aesthetic beauty, Landon aligns herself with ethical poets, such as Pope, Byron’s poetic father.
What is the tale that I would tell? Not one
Of strange adventure, but a common tale
Of woman’s wretchedness; one to be read
Daily in many a young and blighted heart.
The lady whom I spake of rose again
From the red fever’s couch, to careless eyes
Perchance the same as she had ever been.
But oh, how alter’d to herself! (‘Love’s Last Lesson’, 99–106)
Underscoring the frequency of such pain, and the commonness of misadventures, Landon points up the dissimulation demanded of the wounded female. Forced to hide her pain, the goal is to appear unaltered ‘to careless eyes’. Like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and the pressure for Marianne to hide her misery when Willoughby cruelly jilts her, Landon shows young women as forced to perform as if untouched by misery until they are alienated from themselves. Asking ‘Are words, then, only false?’ (‘Love’s Last Lesson’, 117), this question forms the heart of the poem. Despite the love letter taking up the first sixty lines, its inability to console or help the young woman’s situation demands the question as to the point of writing. Her lover’s ambition turned him from the young woman, and the world‐weary speaker offers no salve for either lover: ‘For man’s most golden dreams of pride and power / Are vain as any woman dreams of love;’ (129–30). ‘Love’s Last Lesson’ appears to be the inevitability of loss, a loss that poetry cannot or will not transform into aesthetic gain.
‘Lines of Life’ also shows Landon working in a metapoetic mode. Landon’s speaker witnesses the corrupting influence of society and her separation from the sneering masses, but rather than only lamenting her solitude, poetry becomes a means of creating a connection between the present and the future:
Why write I this? because my heart
Towards the future springs,
That future where it loves to soar
On more than eagle wings.
The present, it is but a speck
In that eternal time,
In which my lost hopes find a home,
My spirit knows its clime.
Oh! not myself,—for what am I?—
The worthless and the weak,
Whose every thought of self should raise
A blush to burn my cheek.
But song has touch’d my lips with fire,
And made my heart a shrine;
For what, although alloy’d, debased,
Is in itself divine.
I am myself but a vile link
Amid life’s weary chain;
But I have spoken hallow’d words,
Oh do not say in vain! (‘Lines of Life’, 73–92)
Written in ballad metre, the determined regularity of the form suggests unadorned honesty, but it is an honesty coloured by close attention to her poetic peers, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The poet, Landon’s speaker claims, looks to the future, placing her in the tradition of Shelley’s sense of the importance of writing for posterity. Landon’s poetic instinct seems to spring less from a sense of self‐preservation than a yearning to communicate with future readers, distinguished by her song, not her self. Divorcing self from song, the speaker claims to be a weak creature who never considers herself, but it is song, those ‘hallowed words’, which elevates her. Reminiscent of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 3, where the poet insists: ‘What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou / Soul of my thought!’ (3.6.50–1), Landon, like Byron, sees vitality as a condition of art, not of the self. Yet where Byron’s meditation displays a confident power, Landon endangers the security of her ‘hallow’d words’ when her final quoted exclamation, ‘Oh do not say in vain!’, shakes the certainty that divine song will guarantee an immortality for her poetry. Going on to imagine her work read by men and women, it seems that her poetry is justified by the response of her readers, as in Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion where Keats defers decision about his status as a poet until a time ‘When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave’ (The Fall of Hyperion 1.18). Landon’s poetry is inflected by Romanticism only to reframe its concerns in a new context.
‘Lines Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love‐Letter’ showcases Landon’s poetic gift by means of its brilliant economy. The poem is suggestive of the sonnet as it opens with a two‐line epigram that contextualizes the following twelve lines: ‘The lines were filled with many a tender thing, / All the impassioned heart’s fond communing’. Landon’s cross‐rhymed lines increase rather than solve the ambiguity that builds in the poem.
I took the scroll: I could not brook,
An eye to gaze on it save mine;
I could not bear another’s look
Should dwell upon one thought of thine.
My lamp was burning by my side,
I held thy letter to the flame,
I marked the blaze swift o’er it glide,
It did not even spare thy name.
Soon the light from the embers past,
I felt so sad to see it die,
So bright at first, so dark at last,
I feared it was love’s history. (‘Lines Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love‐Letter’, 1–12)
Curiously clipped, this self‐contained poem offers a record of an anonymous woman burning a letter sent by her former lover. The detachment of the poem distances the reader even as it seems to recount an intimate event. Refusing to allow the reader access to even ‘one thought of thine’, the speaker’s interest in destroying the letter is bound up less with an attempt to destroy a record of him than to prevent any onlooker from looking upon their shared history. Affecting in its careful denial of disclosure or emotion, the heart of the poem, ‘It did not even spare thy name’, shows the absent lover to whom she speaks being effaced completely. The reader turns voyeur, reading lines written as a response to destroying other lines for fear of being read. Christopher Nagle rightly shows that the poem does not even attempt to behave as a consolation for or replacement of the original lines.8 That it is ‘Love’s history’, not merely their personal history that burns, ‘So bright at first, so dark at last’, shows the speaker including the fate of all love affairs in the same conflagration.
Angela Leighton shows that ‘Poetry is the single motive and motif for all her [Landon’s] verse’,9 and Landon’s repeated invocation of Sappho bears witness to Landon’s intense self‐consciousness as a poet. Yet the source of fascination is Sappho’s divided status, where her femininity and her poetic power seem not incongruent but that the latter cannot rescue the former from pain and disappointment. ‘And Sappho knew that genius, riches, fame, / May not soothe slighted love’ (‘Sappho’, 71–2). While Landon celebrates Sappho’s genius without equivocation or any apology for her vocation, her status as a poet becomes almost painful for its inability to soothe or salve love’s pain. ‘Sappho’s Song’, a poem within a poem in Landon’s bestselling The Improvisatrice, shows Landon reaching for lyrical intensity by embodying Sappho, her chosen ancient Greek double. Sappho comes to ‘personify lyric’,10 as Landon mingles poetic pride with personal loss. While the opening of the poem sought to blame her romantic loss on her lyrical brilliance, by the second stanza, Sappho is forced to admit that art did not exact any heavy cost to her life:
Yet wherefore, wherefore should I blame
Thy power, thy spell, my gentlest lute?
I should have been the wretch I am,
Had every chord of thine been mute. (‘Sappho’s Song’, The Improvisatrice, 145–8)
Refusing to create a binary between the personal and poetic, Landon does not compromise her poetic art by blaming it for romantic suffering. Despite the first stanza blaming the ‘poison’ and ‘fever’ of song, here, Sappho seems almost carried away by ‘Thy power, thy spell, my gentlest lute’, rising to a celebration of the beauty of the lute even in the midst of a lament for her wretched state. ‘A Child Screening a Dove from a Hawk. By Stewardson’ also avoids empty moralizing. Setting itself up as an exemplar of balanced simplicity, the surface blandness of the apparent moral, ‘Ever amid the sweets of life / Some evil thing must be’ (7–8), becomes a kind of disguise. The following line, ‘Ah moralize!’, suggests that such moral certainty does not prevent pain, and this sardonic fatalism allows Landon to ironize didactic poetry.
Here as elsewhere, the reader senses the force of Nagle’s argument that ‘Only by struggling to see the value in the “artificial” – in its commercial, aesthetic, epistemological, and affective senses – its splendid, multi‐layered and poly‐vocal artifice – will the substantive richness of Landon’s poetry emerge for readers of the present century’.11