Women's Month - Day two

Today I would like to talk about Romantic poetry. The Romantic poets are generally known as William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percey Shelley. So who do you think was the best-selling poet of the time? It was in fact a woman called Felicia Hemans, who apparently regularly outsold Byron, and was extremely popular in both Britain and America, and managed to support herself and her children with her poetry when her husband died. And hardly anyone knows about her now - I did an English degree, and only learned about her in passing, and I think that was from one discussion about how women of the time were often forgotten about no matter how successful they were. We certainly never looked at any of her poetry. Essentially, lots of people didn't give a shit about the male Romantic poets in their lifetime, but later on when people (men) were creating syllabuses for English literature courses in universities, they looked back at the period and tried to pick out who were the most important and influential poets, the most worth studying, and they decided it was the men. But rest assured, I have books of Felicia Hemans' poetry on my wishlist to buy someday. Maybe I'll hate it. But she did exist. And did better in her time than most of the male poets.