Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T16:41:24.405Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Inspired by Nature, Inspired by Love: Two Poets on Poetic Inspiration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Susanne Kord
Affiliation:
University College London
Get access

Summary

Two ideas have predominated both the contemporary reception of peasant women's poetry and later scholarship: the assumption that the author's work must have been inspired by Nature (presumably because she was a peasant) and that the work must have been inspired by Love (presumably because she was a woman). The first idea is, as discussed in previous chapters, closely linked with conjectures voiced in aesthetic treatises about the nature poet and his or her predilections, themes, and genres; the second is a notion that is not particular to the work of women peasant poets but has demonstrably influenced the reception of bourgeois women writers as well. In this chapter, I try not to diminish the centrality of either concept for the writing of lower-class women: Anna Louisa Karsch, for example, was a prolific love poet, even though many of her most ardent love poems, which were inserted into letters to Gleim, were never published during her lifetime. Most peasant poets discussed in this book wrote some love poems, and Nature or nature imagery is undeniably central to their work. But whereas verse that uses love and nature as themes clearly constitutes a significant portion of these poets' oeuvre, my focus is not on these poems, which could be read as responding to bourgeois expectations, but rather on works that thematize these expectations more directly.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×