[The Introduction by Anne Finch]

By

The Introduction by Anne Finch

Outline

This research paper follows the following outline:

Thesis Statement

Introduction

Background

Analysis

“The Introduction”

Conclusion

Thesis Statement

In this paper, it discusses as opposed to literature by women, upholds a political, cultural, social, or religious stand asserting the position of women as equal to that of men.

Introduction

Finch, Anne, “Countess of Winchelsea” Anne Finch's (1661-1720) Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions (1713) was the most important book of poetry written by a woman in the eighteenth century. The volume shows her abilities in a range of styles, from high through the middle to comic and low. In the higher registers are religious poems, a verse tragedy, and Pindaricodes, including “Upon the Hurricane,” a vivid meditation on a 1703 hurricane as the “stormy wind” of Psalm 148, sent by God to confound all categories and distinctions through which humans order and make sense of their world. One of the long Pindarics, “The Spleen,” had previously been published in Charles Gildon's New Collection of Poems on Several Occasions (1701), accompanied by Nicholas Rowe's commendatory poem, “Epistle to Flavia,” predicting that Finch would rule over the realm of poetry.

In the middle registers are songs, pastorals or “Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia,” on a subject of great importance to Finch and many other women poets, female friendship. Finch persistently questions the forms in which she writes. For example, in “To a Friend, in Praise of the Invention of Writing Letters,” she considers the nature and limitations of the epistle form. Many of the poems are in the relatively humble form of the fable. Finch was a technically accomplished poet, celebrated in her own time for her lyrics and fables. Twentieth-century feminist criticism was especially interested in how she revised many poetic forms in which male speaking voices were naturalized by imagining them from the perspective of a female speaker (Hellegers, 199).

Background

Finch's desire to write and her ambition to have her words admired, even to have them sting, seems to fuel the urgency many of her lowly creatures feel to speak and seen. Finch's sense, expressed in “The Introduction,” that as a poet she is trespassing on the prerogatives of men feels akin to the lowly animals' transgressions of the usual species boundary that allots speech only to men. She seems to confront and to work through some of her fear at being ridiculed as a woman writer by, her repeated inventions of comic incongruities like this rat in a floured wig with his tiny nutshell snuff box. Feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s naturally first gravitated toward Finch's most explicit poems of female complaint and protest. Subsequent criticism has begun attentive and "historicized" readings of a wider range of her poems, including the fables. While her work was admired throughout the eighteenth century, only now is criticism beginning to reveal the full range and sophistication of her poetry (Ellis, 45).

Analysis

During the eighteenth century, after her death, Anne Finch was recalled primarily as the author of “The Spleen,” widely admired as an exemplar of the then ...