Anna Laetitia Barbauld Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Anna Laetitia Barbauld

With her first publication, a slender volume titled Poems (1773), Anna Laetitia Aikin became a figure of eminence in the world of letters; she would hold that position until her death--as Anna Laetitia Barbauld--well into the next century. While ultimately Barbauld was renowned as an educator and a literary critic as well as a poet, it was her early success with verse that laid the foundation for all her later work by revealing not only a poetic sensibility but also a principled and educated mind. Barbauld belongs, like many late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century poets, almost equally to two generations. Like the poets, who preceded her she evinces the Horatian principle utile dulce (the useful with the agreeable) and favors poetic diction over more ordinary speech; like the poets who followed her she celebrates the individual, the passionate, the natural, and the ordinary. She is more than simply a representative poetic voice, however; for in spite of the neglect of her work by twentieth-century critics, even a cursory acquaintance with her poetry and prose reveals that her talent was as unusual as it was real and that her fame in her own time was well deserved.

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