Background
Barbauld was born on 20 June 1743 at Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire, United Kingdom. Her father, the Rev. John Aikin, a Presbyterian minister and schoolmaster.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
book
The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld
( This volume brings together for the first time all the ...)
This volume brings together for the first time all the known poems of English writer Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825), a once esteemed but long neglected figure whose career spanned the Age of Sensibility and the Romantic Era. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft have collected 170 of her poems, including twenty-three previously unpublished and eleven conjectural attributions. This is the first scholarly edition of any writings of Barbauld, a brilliant woman whose interests ranged from literary criticism to history and affairs of state to childrens stories. At the end of the eighteenth century, Barbauld may well have been the most eminent living poet, male or female, in Britain. Barbauld belongs almost equally to two generations. Her verse displays an eighteenth-century adherence to balance, common sense, and poetic diction and meter, but it also celebrates the individual, the passionate, and the fanciful in a clearly Romantic manner. In the current reconfiguring of Romanticism, Barbauld provides an important contrast to the major male poets who have, until recently, defined the era--poets who clearly acknowledged her influence on their own work, yet who played a role in Barbaulds lapse into obscurity in the century after her death. Coleridge, before a serious falling out with Barbauld, admired her greatly, and Wordsworth confessed that he wished the final eight lines of her poem ?Life had been of his own composing. Walter Savage Landor ranked her ?Summer Evenings Meditation among the finest poems in the English language. Barbaulds poems have retained their capacity to delight readers; they are witty, learned, imaginative, and unpredictable in both choice and treatment of subject. Read as a whole, this collection reveals a striking variety of style and voice and provides the basis for a major--and long overdue--reevaluation of Barbaulds poetry. McCarthy and Kraft present unmodernized texts of the poems that reflect as nearly as possible the authors final intention and give variant readings in textual notes. A lengthy introduction includes a discussion of the poems, a history of their composition and publication, and an outline of Barbaulds life and writing career.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0820315281/?tag=2022091-20
Hymns in Prose for Children (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Hymns in Prose for Children When I am older...)
Excerpt from Hymns in Prose for Children When I am older, I will praile him better; and I will never forget God, lo long as my life remaineth in me. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1334393966/?tag=2022091-20
Anna Laetitia Barbauld
Edit Profileeditor essayist literary critic poet
Education
Her father taught his daughter Latin and Greek.
Career
In 1773, Barbauld brought out her first book of poems, after her friends had praised them and convinced her to publish. The collection, entitled simply Poems, went through four editions in just one year and surprised Barbauld by its success. The same year she and her brother, John Aikin, jointly published Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, which was also well received.
After the wedding, she and her husband moved to Suffolk, near where Rochemont had been offered a congregation and a school for boys. Barbauld took this time and rewrote some of the psalms, a common pastime in the eighteenth century, publishing them as Devotional Pieces Compiled from the Psalms and the Book of Job.
For her adopted child Charles Barbauld wrote her most famous books: Lessons for Children (1778–79) and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781).
Barbauld and her husband spent eleven years teaching at Palgrave Academy in Suffolk.
In 1802 they removed to Stoke Newington.
She collaborated with Dr Aikin in his Evenings at Home; in 1795 she published an edition of Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, with a critical essay; two years later she edited Collins's Odes; in 1804 she published a selection of papers from the English Essayists, and a selection from Samuel Richardson's correspondence, with a biographical notice; in 1810 a collection of the British Novelists (50 vols. )
This poem anticipated Macaulay in contemplating the prospect of a visitor from the antipodes regarding at a future day the ruins of St Paul's from a broken arch of Blackfriars Bridge.
Achievements
-
She was a noted teacher at the Palgrave Academy, her essays demonstrated that it was possible for a woman to be publicly engaged in politics.
Barbauld was remembered only as a pedantic children's writer, For example her Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose had (children's book), an unprecedented impact on the poetry of William Blake and William Wordsworth, they were also used to teach several generations of school children.
Works
book
-
The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld
( This volume brings together for the first time all the ...)
-
Hymns in Prose for Children (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Hymns in Prose for Children When I am older...)
-
The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld
Politics
During the French Revolution, that Barbauld published her most radical political pieces. Barbauld published her Epistle to William Wilberforce Esq. On the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade, which not only lamented the fate of the slaves, but also warned of the cultural and social degeneration the British could expect if they did not abandon slavery. In 1792, she continued this theme of national responsibility in an anti-war sermon entitled Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation.
Connections
In May 1774, despite some "misgivings", Barbauld married Rochemont Barbauld (1749–1808), the grandson of a French Huguenot and a former pupil at Warrington. In 1775 the couple adopted Charles.
References
-
Born
-
Died
March 9, 1825 (aged 81) -
Resting place
St Mary's vault, Stoke Newington, United Kingdom -
Nationality
English