SOURCE: "Lady Winchilsea and the Poetic Tradition of the Seventeenth Century," in Studies in Philology, Vol. XLII, No. 1, January, 1945, pp. 61-80.

In the following excerpt, Brower situates Finch's poems within the metaphysical traditions of John Milton and John Donne.

There is little likelihood that present-day readers will regard Anne as a member of the Romantic family unhappily born before 1798. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate that the preface to the standard edition of the poems should so exaggerate Lady Anne's "romantic" qualities. Dr. Reynolds, like most writers on the pre-Romantics, is only too eager to find intimations of Wordsworth in the poetry of the eighteenth century. Yet she shows quite clearly in her preface that Lady Anne was no voice crying in the wilderness of Augustan England. On the contrary, it appears that Lady Winchilsea was acquainted with the leading writers of her day, with Prior, Swift, Pope, Gay, and...