Before Wordsworth...
I’m fascinated by how often the individual lives of creators are discussed or known, and yet art is created in such wide and broad contexts of ideas and influences. It’s a bit of the six degrees of separation idea—when you pull back just a bit you can trace the influences, the conversations, the ideas—limn the developments that led to certain movements, poetry, books, artwork, music.
While in London Mary Wolstencraft shared the same intellectual circle as Thomas Paine, as well as several women writers and early feminists, such as Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Sarah Siddons (whose famous portrait by Gainsborough cemented the look of Georgian beauty ideals).
Aaron Burr—that vice president—and his wife were ardent admirers of Mary Wolstencraft and believed in her feminist principles and ideas for egalitarian child-rearing—they raised their daughter Theodosia on those same feminist principles. Burr even commissioned a copy of a portrait of Wolstencraft (which Mary’s husband, William Godwin, actually thought was the better likeness). Godwin and Wolstencraft were also friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake.
The Lake District of England was arguably made famous with the poetry of William Wordsworth and his friend and companion Samuel Taylor Coleridge—but if you pull back from Dove Cottage only slightly, you find the other writers—Dorothy Wordsworth for one, William’s sister and an avid writer in her own right, whose diaries William would pull ideas from (and really should be much more widely read. Her descriptions of the natural world are prose poems).
But born in the same Cumbrian borders of the Lake District only a few years before the Wordsworth siblings, there was the poet Susanna Blamire, as well as her friend and collaborator Catherine Gilpin, sister of William Gilpin. And if we pull back slightly further, Susanna—descended from a Scottish family living on the Scottish border, entranced with Scots language and song—was writing only slightly ahead of Robert Burns, who in fact may have been influenced by the songs of Susanna Blamire when he was collecting and creating Scottish folks songs (and an even further stretch, Susanna Blamire’s cousin married the cousin of Fletcher Christian—who later famously led the mutiny of the HMSBounty). So many threads of influence and ideas and events.
Many critics and contemporaries of Susanna Blamire felt that her poetry and songs were some of the finest lyrics of the day, that they were sure to be remembered and read forever. And yet her work was only published nearly a century after her birth, and today she remains largely unknown.
Susanna Blamire was born in 1747 to a yeoman farmer father and a mother who died when she was only seven. When her father remarried she and her siblings were sent to live with their aunt. With her love of Scottish verse and song, she accompanied her newly married sister and her husband to Scotland in 1767 when she was 19, staying there for several years. She never married and died at the age of 47.
Only a few of her poems were published anonymously while she lived, most likely submitted from the popularity of her manuscripts’ circulation without her knowledge. She wrote primarily for herself and for friends, who circulated her work through correspondence and sharing copies of her work.
She wrote songs in Lowland Scots (the same language of Robert Burns), as well as in the Cumberland dialect, and poetry in English. Her first dated poem is from 1766, “Written in a Churchyard,” a lament for the lives buried beneath the grass of a churchyard that was matter-of-factly grazed by cattle. Similar to Wordsworth, her work often focused on working people's lives and the beauty of nature, anticipating the later work of the Romantic poets. She loved the guitar and was known to take it with her on walks, composing poetry and songs in the woods, pinning her poems to oak trees for the occasional passerby to read.
While Blamire remains largely unknown, the probable sphere of her influence can be traced in well-known writers and composers—the lines of her poems like ghosts flickering in and out of literature and music.
When she lived in Scotland with her sister she befriended her brother-in-law’s influential neighbors at Gartmore House, a place where it is believed Robert Burns also later stayed. While the origins of “Auld Lang Syne” precede both Robert Burns and Susanna Blamire, there are interesting similarities in Blamire’s poem “The Traveller Returns“ also known as “The Nabob.” Blamire’s poem is set to the same tune as “Auld Lang Syne,” and similarly shares a lament for the passage of time, and longing for days “langsyne:”
WHEN silent time, wi' lightly foot, / Had trod on thirty years, / I sought again my native land / Wi' mony hopes and fears: / Wha kens gin the dear friends I left / May still continue mine ? / Or gin I e'er again shall taste / The joys I left langsyne ?….
I ran to ilka dear friend's room, / As if to find them there, / I knew where ilk ane used to sit, / And hang o'er mony a chair; / Till soft remembrance threw a veil / Across these een o' mine, / I clos'd the door, and sobb'd aloud, / To think on auld langsyne! …
Ye sons to comrades o' my youth, / Forgie an auld man's spleen, / Wha 'midst your gayest scenes still mourns / The days he ance has seen: / When time has past, and seasons fled, / Your hearts will feel like mine; / And aye the sang will maist delight / That minds ye o' langsyne !
The Cambridge History of Literature lists Blamire’s “Nabob” as “a kind of parody” of “Auld Lang Syne,”—yet Blamire wrote her poem in 1788, and Burns did not publish his version of “Auld Lang Syne” until 1796, two years after Susanna Blamire’s death. Burns claimed that he took it down from an ‘old man singing,’ but crafted many of his own indelible verses.
Both poets share another poem of similar title and theme—Blamire wrote “I’m Tibby Fowler O’ the Glen,” while Burns published “Tibbie Fowler” in 1796. Both poems address the idea that men seeking a wife are far more interested in a woman’s wealth than in beauty or character. It’s thought possible that Burns may have read versions of Blamire’s song that were left in the library of Gartmore House, as Susanna later sent many letters and poems to her friends there.
Two of Blamire’s poems were published anonymously in c. 1780, with a third published separately. All three were later set to music by Joseph Haydn, at the height of the Romantic interest in Scottish history. One of these was later set to music again by the early 19th-century composer Sir Henry Rowley Bishop, as well as the composer John Parry. Much later, Charles Dickens would quote the first two lines of Blamire’s song-poem “The Siller Croun” in his novel The Old Curiosity Shop.
It is also feasible that Blamire’s verse reached and influenced Byron. Blamire wrote a political poem addressing support for the coming French Revolution, which bears marked similarities in theme and wording with Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon.” Susanna Blamire’s nephew had been tutor to Byron’s first wife Annabella Milbanke until her marriage to Byron, and it’s thought feasible that a manuscript of Susanna Blamire’s work had made its way to the Milbanke house—and perhaps it was lingering somewhere in Byron’s mind as he wrote his narrative poem.
Susanna’s adult years of writing were marked by her close friendship with Catherine Gilpin. Catherine’s brother, William Gilpin, wrote one of the most famous treatises on gardening in the enlightenment period, originating ideas on the “picturesque.” Several of William Gilpin’s works, which would become emblematic of the Romantic age and ideals, were published by Susanna’s brother, a London publisher. In her poem “Hope,” she nearly describes the ideals of the picturesque:
…Descend ! and mount yon hill with me, / There let me opening prospects see, / Which, step by step, shall fairer grow / The while as fades this scene below. / Forests of immortal oak; / Rocks by tumbling torrents broke; / "Shallow brooks, and rivers wide, / Verdant meads, with daisies pied;" / Distant cities, large and proud; / Mountains dim, that seem a cloud; / Castles high, that live on hills; / Little cots, that seek the drills; / Upland grounds, where flocks are seen / Mixing white with darkest green; / What ! though painted on the air, / Still they look serene and fair.
Susanna and Catherine Gilpin became lifelong friends, collaborating on songs and poetry—including one of an imagined bickering between husband and wife, “The Cumberland Scold,” that the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid considers “this perfect masterpiece of dialect poetry:”
‘But hark ye, Dick! I’ll tell ye what,— / ’Twas I that meade the blunder; / That I tuick up wi’ leyke o’ thee, / Was far the greetest wonder!
Blamire’s Poetical Works would not be published until 50 years after her death, in 1842. By that time the Romantic Movement had come and gone, and her poems were most likely viewed as antiquated and sentimental, contributing to her obscurity today.
Catherine Gilpin’s relative Sidney Gilpin would go on to publish a collection of the two women’s work in one volume in 1866, and described the relationship between Susanna Blamire and Catherine Gilpin as similar to that of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Miss Blamire’s friendship with Miss Gilpin…forms one of the most delightful chapters in her biography. They were kindred spirits. They lived together; visited together; wrote lyrics together; and in their deaths were not long divided…We are thus pleasantly reminded…of Wordsworth and Coleridge issuing conjointly their lyrical ballads.
While both Susanna had died by the time that Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads was published, the collaboration of Susanna and Catherine Gilpin, with poems in the dialect of Cumbria, the Lakes, and the Borders, is an interesting parallel genesis of early Romantic work in the region. Wordsworth wrote often about the deep feelings of the working class, and Coleridge believed that true poetry was a “faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power…of the imagination.” Blamire also wrote of the working class, and in a letter referred to herself as “the plain simple muse, whom Nature appoints as her scribe.” In her poem “A Petition to April, written during sickness, 1793,” you can hear the truth of nature with the power of the imagination and poignancy that Blamire was able to effect in her poetry:
…To thee I'll rear a mossy throne, / And bring the violet yet unblown; / Then teach it just to ope its eye, / And on thy bosom fondly die; / Embalm it in thy tears, and see / If thou hast one more left for me. / In thy pale noon no roses blow, / Nor lilies spread their summer snow; / Nor would I wish this time-worn cheek / In all the blush of health to break; / No; give me ease and cheerful hours, / And take away thy fairer flowers; / So may the rude gales cease to blow, / And every breeze yet milder grow, / Till I in slumber softly sleep, / Or wake but to grow calm and weep; / And o'er thy flowers in pity bend, / Like the soft sorrows of a friend.
In the collection that Catherine’s relative Sidney would go on to publish, he wrote of Blamire:
She was unquestionably the best female writer of her age; and had her works been published during her life, with the final corrections of their author, her name by this date would have attained an honourable position among the poets of our country. Late as they have been in being brought before the public, I have no fear for their fate, but anticipate her poems will be found in the collection of every reader of taste.
Jonathan Wordsworth, the great-nephew of William Wordsworth and a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, wrote that
Susanna will eventually be seen as important as the other Romantic poets writing during the eighteenth century.
In fact, nearly every commenter I’ve been able to find—whether in an obscure biographical entry or in the preface to the two original collections of her work—there are references to her as the “muse of her age,” and range from being assured of her place in Romantic literature, or lamenting that she is not more widely read.
In researching these women’s work, I’m astonished again and again at how many unknown women have always been writing, how similar the stories are—of remaining unpublished until after their death, of remaining unmarried, of how often they address feminist ideas. And the influence and connections their work had on those that history remembers well by a single name—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns—and farther afield, Shelley and Keats.
How do we dispel the idea of individual genius when it comes to creators, and recognize much wider contexts, the web of influences and ideas—and importantly, the women and other marginalized writers who have contributed to what we think of as the history of art, literature, music, and ideas? Why can we no longer find these works read, written about, discussed?
How much more kaleidoscopic the world of literature and culture and history might be if we were to be taught their names.
Primary Links:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31970001998878&view=1up&seq=32
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/bwrp/BlamSPoeti/1:5?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
Secondary Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_Blamire
https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Passionate_Poet/A0ru6JLocrAC?hl=en&gbpv=0
https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/authors/pers00280.shtml#