Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld : The Poems

The Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld presents, for the first time, all the known surviving works of this major English writer, who lived from 1743 to 1825. Poet, essayist, editor, innovative writer for children, polemicist for religious and political reform, Barbauld helped set the agenda for Anglo-American culture for over a century. Her poems influenced Coleridge and Wordsworth; her writings on education, church-state relations, identity politics, and the ethics of citizenship are freshly relevant today; her commentary on books and writers went far to establish today's canon of English novelists. Beyond their importance, her writings are distinguished by great charm and profound intelligence.

Volume I presents all of Anna Letitia Barbauld's known poems, drawing on manuscript and printed sources that were not known in 1994, when the last standard edition of Barbauld's poems was published. William McCarthy's critical edition adds new poems to Barbauld's canon, and removes several found to be doubtful. It takes into account the surprising number of early American texts. It revisits the question of copy-texts and makes different choices of them. It re-dates several poems and corrects and supplements annotations. It notices reprints, which played a major role in creating Barbauld's after-image on both shores of the Atlantic. The Poems, Revised, is the new standard edition today, indispensable for all students of Barbauld's work.

William McCarthy, Professor Emeritus, Iowa State University

William McCarthy is Professor Emeritus of Iowa State University, and General Editor of The Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld.