William McCarthy

Recently William McCarthy has pronounced this poem seldom matched for conceptual density. (He cites as its peers in this respect Johnson 's The Vanity of Human Wishes and Ann Yearsley 's Addressed to Ignorance.)

ALB was a presence in the early poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge , though they later distanced themselves from her so emphatically. Her work appeared in magazines in the USA before the end of the...

HLP persistently denigrated herself as a poet, probably for reasons of gender, calling her verses trifling, nonsense, or trash. Thraliana remains the nearest thing to a collected edition of her poetry, but by the time...

William Enfield quoted eight lines from Aikin (as Our Poetess) in dedicating his very popular anthology The Speaker, designed for the teaching of elocution, to the head of Warrington Academy . Her volume...

The young Samuel Rogers sent enthusiastic praise; he said he found ALB 's style easily recognisable. The Monthly Review and Analytical Review were equally laudatory, while, predictably, conservative voices expressed disgust. A country clergyman sent...

ALB grounds her specific political aims in general principles about the nature of patriotism and the moral individual's relation to that entity called our country. To her the idea which most nations have entertained, that...

A recently-discovered later manuscript adds 80 lines to the form of this poem (which William McCarthy calls touching though metrically immature) that was known from its original printing.

It is reproduced in William McCarthy 's biography.