Katherine Philips: agent of matchlessness

Author: Hodgson, Elizabeth

Source: Women's Writing, Volume 10, Number 1, March 2003 , pp. 119-136(18)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

Katherine Philips's epithalamia distinctively illustrate the flexible ambiguities in Philips's poetic voice and agency. Philips invokes the history of the epithalamic form, especially as it was embellished by Spenser, Donne, and Herrick, in her own poems on the subject. Philips particularly makes use of the epithalamium's satirical tendencies, its masculinist narratives, and its shifting alliances between poetic speaker and marital actors to structure her ambivalent poems on her friends' marriages. Despite the famous boldness and self-revelatory surface of Philips's poetic style, her epithalamia are marked by subtle plays on naming and identity, shifting disguises, and uneasy alliances with women, as she negotiates with the marriage poem's culturally complex relationships between brides and poets. And, most important, Philips's discursive relationship with her literary forebears in the epithalamic tradition reveals precisely how performative and opaque is the gendered agency of her poetic speaker.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09699080300200190

Publication date: 2003-03-01