Felicia Hemans
Felicia Hemans [' hemənz ] ( born September 25, 1793 † 1835) was a British poet. Her most famous poem is "Casa Bianca ", which recounts the death of Louis de Casabianca and his 12 - year-old son in the Battle of the Nile.
Life and work
Felicia Hemans Felicia Dorothea Browne was born in Liverpool. Due to the business activities of her father the family moved soon after to Wales, where she grew up. She herself has always conceived as Welsh.
Her first poems were published in 1808 in Liverpool, when she was just 15 years old. They were dedicated to the then Prince of Wales and excited great interest. Shelley corresponded for some time with her because of these poems. Her next book of poems was entitled The domestic affections, and was published in 1812. In the same year she married Captain Alfred Hemans, an Irish army officer who was several years older than her. Together with him she lived in Daventry in Northamptonshire.
During her first six years of marriage Felicia Hemans mother of five sons was. 1819 she separated from her husband. During her marriage she continued to pursue her literary career and published several volumes of poetry.
While her husband went to Italy, Felicia Hemans moved to Wales to live in St. Asaph in their birthplace. Theme of her poems were personalities of the British Royal Family. She dedicated an elegy for example, the Princess Charlotte, daughter of George IV, who had died in childbirth. Numerous poems reminiscent of George III. With one of her poems she had already won in 1819 a Scottish literary contest, which earned her appreciation of the Scottish public. My play The Vespers of Palermo in 1823 listed with little success at London's Covent Garden. More success came in 1824, however, with the same piece in Edinburgh, where it was also listed on the initiative of Sir Walter Scott. Scott, one of Scotland's national poet, was one of her close friends and supporters. They also began to write for the Edinburgh Review.
Welsh Melodies is a book of poetry that even a series of translations of Welsh poetry contains and shows that Felicia Hemans dominated Welsh. The poems were intended as lyrics and have historical events and legends to content. The Ballad contained therein "The Meeting of the Bards " was written for the London Eisteddfod in 1822 and was listed there as well as some of her other poems. In 1827, she moved away from Wales, first lived in a suburb of Liverpool and later in the Lake District where she lived at the home of William Wordsworth.
From 1831 she lived in Dublin. She was at that time a well-known figure in the British literary scene, had a large following in North America and was highly appreciated by authors such as Wordsworth and Scott. To their readership among women in particular. When she died in 1835, reminded both Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor to the author.
Appreciation
Felicia Hemans 's works are marked by a certain sentimentality and Victorian chauvinism. However, they also show an undeniable originality, which reflects its unusual for that time of independence. Her work also The Records of Woman, published in 1828, in which she described the fate of both famous and unknown women as heard. Her poems were very popular for over a century. Her best-known poem that was a long time in the UK and in the U.S. for school curriculum, is "Casa Bianca ". For U.S. school curriculum belonged to in the 1950s also her poem "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England ":
Although it has been appreciated in their lifetime by many even today famous poets and authors, has taken more and more recognition as a serious poet. Already the British satirist Saki, the Edwardian the UK caricatured especially made clear in some of his short stories that they belong with their works of the standard repertoire of English poems, but he could no longer take it seriously. The sentimentality of her poems appealed to parody and so her once famous poem "The Stately Homes of England " is now known only in the satirical version of Noël Coward to a wider readership.