Foiled by Pleasure
Matthew Bevis: Barrett Browning, 30 August 2018
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Writings
edited by Josie Billington and Philip Davis.
Oxford, 592 pp., £14.99, February 2018,978 0 19 879763 0 Show More
edited by Josie Billington and Philip Davis.
Oxford, 592 pp., £14.99, February 2018,
“... occurs in an early poem which appears to be fretful about gratification. In her translation of St Gregory Nazianzen’s ‘Soul and Body’, she has the rhetorician pray for the right words, ones that ‘may flourish/Of which mine enemy would spoil me,/Using pleasurehood to foil me!’ But the poem’s own fondness for verbal flourishes isn’t easily ... ”