Anna Letitia Barbauld Poetry Homepage

Welcome to our website, which celebrates the poetry of Anna Letitia Barbauld. This romantic writer has been sadly neglected for the past two hundred years--overlooked by her contemporaries, because she was a woman writing about the domestic life (which was of course entirely too appropriate to women, and so was ignored by male critics) or politics (which was inappropriate for a woman to discuss, and so was vilified).

In the midst of Barbauld’s busy domestic life, however, her imagination transposed female labor and female concerns into poems that both celebrate women’s work and sharply critique contemporary exploitations and oppressions. This website will focus on five poems that demonstrate Barbauld’s interest in, respect for, and use of everyday life. Two of the poems, “The Caterpillar” and “Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley’s Study,” are “miniatures,” poems that take as title and subject a small, specific object. Through her careful and precise descriptions of these objects, however, Barbauld provides an implicit critique of the power structures that dominate her world.

“West End Fair” and “Washing-Day” are both poems about the everyday events of women’s lives, but Barbauld also uses these quotidian happenings to discuss much larger and more serious moral issues. For Anna Letitia, a domestic life was not a hindrance to her social concerns and consciousness, but rather, became the very material with which she imaginatively communicated her critique.

This website came into being as a project for a class at Ohio State University that introduces graduate students to literature of the romantic period. We took English 746 in the spring quarter of 2007 under the direction of Dr. Les Tannenbaum; we are graduate students in OSU's English department. We invite you to send feedback or questions to K. Harkaway-Krieger, C. Sacchi, or E. Strandjord, and to sign our guestbook.

Thank you for visiting!