Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/21

 INTRODUCTION was born in 1661 and died in 1720. Her poems were written after 1685. During the period from 1685 to 1720 she takes rank as a minor writer in all the popular literary forms except comedy. Love songs, sacred songs, pindarics, satires, epistles, fables, translations, tragedies, verse criticism, and one prose critical essay, come within the compass of her works. Her poems are frequently commonplace in substance and even more frequently crude in form. Only now and then does she reach an excellence that would make them of importance apart from their place in literary history. Yet, taken as a whole, her work proves to be of unusual interest. This is due, in part, to the social environment and the literary associations of which the poems give so detailed and clever a picture, and in part to Lady Winchilsea's own personality, as revealed in her work. But the chief elements of interest arise from the fact that she was a heretic in her own day, a protestant, both consciously and unconsciously, against the religious, social, and literary canons then in vogue; and from the further fact that some of her heresies became the orthodox faith of later generations. Her education and her literary activities fall entirely within the compass of the classical period, but her poems show romantic tastes unparalleled in her own day, and not afterward so highly developed before Cowper. She was hardly strong enough to be counted one of the influences in bringing about changes in taste, but she distinctly foreshadows such changes, and it is on her delicate originality and independence of judgment that her claim to literary recognition must rest. xvii