Felicia Hemans
Felicia Dorothea Hemans [ 'hemənz ] (born September 25, 1793 in Liverpool , † May 16, 1835 in Dublin ) was a British poet . Her most famous poem is " Casabianca ", which describes the death of Louis de Casabianca and his 12-year-old son in the sea battle at Abukir .
Life and work
Felicia Hemans was born Felicia Dorothea Browne in Liverpool . Due to her father's business activities, her family soon moved to Wales where she grew up. She has always seen herself as a Welsh woman.
Her first poems were published in Liverpool in 1808 when she was just 15 years old. They were dedicated to the then Prince of Wales and aroused great interest. Shelley corresponded with her for some time because of these poems. Her next volume of poetry was titled The Domestic Affections and was published in 1812. In the same year she married Captain Alfred Hemans, an Irish army officer who was a few years her senior. She lived with him in Daventry , Northamptonshire .
During the first six years of their marriage, Felicia Hemans had five sons. In 1819 she separated from her husband. Even during their marriage, she had continued her literary career and published several volumes of poetry.
While her husband was going to Italy, Felicia Hemans moved to Wales to live in St. Asaph in the house where she was born. Her poems were about personalities from the English royal family . For example, she dedicated an elegy to Princess Charlotte , the daughter of George IV , who had died in childbed . Numerous poems remembered George III. With one of her poems she had already won a Scottish literary competition in 1819 , which earned her appreciation from the Scottish audience. Her play The Vespers of Palermo was staged with little success at London's Covent Garden in 1823 . In contrast, she had more success with the same piece in Edinburgh in 1824 , where it was also performed on the initiative of Sir Walter Scott . Scott, one of Scotland's national poets, became one of her close friends and supporters. She also began writing for the Edinburgh Review .
Welsh Melodies is a volume of poetry that also contains a number of translations of Welsh poetry and shows that Felicia Hemans mastered Welsh. The poems were actually intended as song texts and have historical events and legends as their content. The ballad "The Meeting of the Bards" contained therein was written for the London Eisteddfod in 1822 and was performed there as well as some of her other poems. In 1827 she moved from Wales, first living in the suburbs of Liverpool and later in the Lake District , where she lived in the house of William Wordsworth .
From 1831 she lived in Dublin . She was a well-known figure in the British literary scene at the time, had a large following in North America and was highly valued by authors such as Wordsworth and Scott. Its readership included women in particular. When she died in 1835, both Wordsworth and Walter Savage remembered the author.
Appreciation
Felicia Heman's works are characterized by a certain sentimentality and Victorian chauvinism . However, they also show an undeniable originality, which reflects their independence, which was unusual for the time. Her work also includes The Records of Woman , published in 1828, in which she described the fates of both famous and unknown women. Her poems remained very popular for over a century. Her best-known poem, which has long been part of the school curriculum in Great Britain and the USA, is " Casabianca ". Her poem "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England" was also part of the US school curriculum until the 1950s:
- The breaking waves dashed high
- On a star and rock-bound coast ...
Although she was valued by many poets and authors who are still known today, her recognition as a serious poet has declined more and more. The British satirist Saki , who mainly caricatured Edwardian Great Britain, made it clear in some of his short stories that her work was part of the standard repertoire of English poetry, but that he could no longer take her seriously. The sentimentality of her poems provoked parody and so her once famous poem “The Stately Homes of England” is only known to a broader readership today in the satirical version by Noël Coward .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hemans, Felicia |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hemans, Felicia Dorothea |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 25, 1793 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Liverpool |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 16, 1835 |
| Place of death | Dublin |