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Her fervent devotion to the Romantic cult of poetry made her verses seem quaint even to members of her own literary and social milieu. So did her devotion to the rhetoric of evangelical Christianity. Yet despite such quaintnesses (or possibly owing to them), Barrett Browning came to win greater critical acclaim in her lifetime than any previous woman poet writing in English. She became, in other words, a great voice in Victorian poetry. 4 The following chapter addresses how Barrett Browning eventually used this distinctive voice to achieve an unlikely prominence in revolutionary Victorian understandings of hermeneutics, inspiration, and poetry.

Might a Seraph guest, / Still, 41 42 “Mrs. ” (21–22). 24 The opening passage is worth citing, since Barrett’s additional metaphor in the Seraphim preface of the Christian poet as a “seeing eagle” also comes from here: When the young Eagle, with exulting eye, Has learn’d to dare the splendor of the sky, And leave the Alps beneath him in his course, To bathe his crest in morn’s empyreal source, Will his free wing, from that majestic height, Descend to follow some wild meteor’s light, Which far below, with evanescent fire, Shines to delude, and dazzles to expire?

The manner in which Chateaubriand connects his emotional experience to the broader question of aesthetics over the ensuing six hundred odd pages helped to win over many of his artistic contemporaries. Poetics, after all, comes first in his list of all possible goods: Christianity is “la plus poétique, la plus humaine, la plus favorable à la liberté, aux arts et aux lettres” (the most poetic, the most humane, the most favorable to liberty, art, and literature). Barrett, normally hostile to French royalist Catholic polemic, was apparently swept away.