Abstract
This essay examines the contribution of Ann Batten Cristall (c. 1769–1848) to an early Romantic aesthetic by reading Cristall as a ‘lost’ poet of nature. Cristall’s Poetical Sketches (1795) remain her only published work, but they were well received by renowned contemporaries such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Rogers. Illustrating a development from Sentimentalism to Romanticism, Cristall’s ‘sketches’ are pervaded by elaborate descriptions of landscapes and weathers, fauna and flora. The poems contemplate different understandings of nature and naturalness: besides the wildness of human passion and sentiment, these include the particularities of the non-human natural world, a world characterised by variety and resistance to order. At the same time, organic forms of nature serve as a metaphorical springboard for Cristall’s deliberate and experimental refusal of order in poetic form. Three years before Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads were first published, Cristall’s work anticipated the aesthetic innovations of Romanticism, while also touching upon questions of poetic ecology and ecofeminism.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Works Cited
Blake, William. 2008. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Eds. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: Norton.
Connolly, Tristanne. 2007. Transgender Juvenilia: Blake’s and Cristall’s Poetical Sketches. In: Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder, 26–34. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cope, Jonas. 2014. Delights and Degrees of Passionate Sensibility: ‘Mental Fight’ in Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical Sketches. Romanticism, 20: 15–29.
Feldman, Paula. (ed.). 1997. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.
Greene, Richard. 2004–2016. Cristall, Ann Batten (bap. 1769, d. 1848). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. David Cannadine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37323. Accessed 14 September 2018.
Labbe, Jacqueline. 2007. The Seductions of Form in the Poetry of Ann Batten Cristall and Charlotte Smith. In: Romanticism and Form. Ed. Alan Rawes, 154–70. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lonsdale, Roger. (ed.). 1989. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
McGann, Jerome. 1996. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press.
Milton, John. 2003. Paradise Lost. In: The Major Works: Including Paradise Lost. Eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, vol. 4. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
OED Online. ‘Embryo’. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com/view/Entry/61058. Accessed 11 January 2019.
Oswald, Alice. 2002. Dart. London: Faber and Faber.
Sha, Richard C. 1998. The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sitter, John. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wu, Duncan. (ed.). 1997. Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell.
———. (ed.). 2012. Romanticism: An Anthology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
John, S. (2020). Wild Verse: The Art of Nature in the Poetry of Ann Batten Cristall. In: Lennartz, N. (eds) The Lost Romantics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35546-3_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35546-3_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35545-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35546-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)