SOURCE: Demers, Patricia. “Poetics of Beneficence: Practice and Patronage.” In The World of Hannah More, pp. 48-75. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

In the following essay, Demers explores More's role as a poet and as a literary patron of Ann Yearsley, a working-class poet from Bristol, England.

Hannah More and William Blake were writing poetry at the same time; yet they appear to live in totally different worlds. In contrast to the prophecies and visions of Blake exploring woman's socio-sexual dilemma and the more general corruption of human potentiality, the intellectual matrix of More's couplets is still deeply influenced by Augustan poetics and ethical considerations. Throughout her poetry she accents or underscores the Augustan humanist enterprise, which Paul Fussell has characterized as “deducing a stable ethics from the actual nature of man tenderly but no less rigorously considered,”¹ with a distinctive biblical consciousness of peccant fallibility. More's...