Ann Batten Cristall and the Lyrical Sketch: The Influence of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics on Lyric Performativity

Abstract

There is only a small body of scholarship on British Romantic poet Ann Batten Cristall who published one collection, Poetical Sketches, in 1795. This thesis analyzes the songs of her diverse collection, which have yet to receive substantive critical attention. I clarify the nature of her aesthetic by introducing the “lyrical sketch” as a genre in which she works, reimagining the “irregularities” of her poetry as instances of innovation. The scholarship on Cristall has tended to be feminist as it seeks to repair her literary reputation. Comparisons between Cristall and Blake are common and seek to legitimize her work by arguing that her genius is similar to Blake’s. While comparing her to Blake in this manner gives Cristall some credibility, it does so at the expense of recognizing her unique contribution to the lyric genre. I put Cristall and Blake’s lyrics in dialogue by placing them on a lyric spectrum with Frye’s pictorial and musical boundaries. My hope is that this alternative methodology illustrates the way in which Cristall can help us read Blake as much as he provides insight into reading her poetry. This project and its approach reaffirm the importance of reading poetry by women in a shared tradition with male writers, resulting in a more comprehensive genre study that nuances the construction of the British Romantic lyric.

Although I offer a critique of current strategies to recover the work of women writers, my project shares a similar feminist motivation. Cristall’s poetry questions the construction of the solitary (male) lyric speaker. In demystifying the aura of the isolated speaker, Cristall complicates the addresser-addressee relationship, opening up the lyric to the reader. Additionally, she confounds the notion that genius and the role of the lyric “I” are the prerogatives of men.

The first chapter examines Cristall’s meter and rhythm in light of late eighteenth-century understandings of the arts to elucidate her key aesthetic principles of verbal immediacy, derivative of the sketch, and lyric performativity. Consideration of the cultures of the visual arts and music combined with formalist readings reveals that Cristall’s lyrical sketch is more musical than pictorial. I argue that she achieves these rhetorical effects through her manipulation of genre in the lyrical sketch.

In the second chapter, I contrast her songs to William Blake’s “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence to better define the lyrical sketch and to highlight Cristall’s formal ingenuity. The juxtaposition of Cristall’s musical lyrical sketch with Blake’s pictorial illuminated lyric demonstrates the dialectical interaction of the rhetorical strategies of the visual arts (immediacy) and of music (performativity). In Cristall’s poetry, it becomes evident that lyrical sonority subsumes the visual aspects of the sketch. Finally, I conclude with the hypothesis that the lyrical sketch, and its challenges to traditional notions of the lyric, is not a genre that unique to Cristall, and warrants further study.