The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne - Catherine Maxwell

What does it mean to "bear blindness" and why should this be a concern for male poets after Milton? This study of vision, gender, and poetry traces Milton's mark on Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne to show how the lyric male poet achieves vision at the cost of symbolic blindness and feminization. Drawing together a wide range of concerns including the use of myth, the gender of the sublime, the lyric fragment, and the relation of pain to creativity, this work is a re-evaluation of the male poet and the making of the English poetic tradition.;This volume examines the feminization of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus, and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminizes the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energizes him. This imaginative revisionist study suggests an interpretative framework for Victorian men's poetry, while providing detailed and extensive rereadings of many major poems. The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry.