Critic: Travis DuPriest

Source: Poems: 1667, by Katherine Philips, pp. 3-25. Delmar, New York: Scholars

[(essay date 1992) In the following essay, DuPriest provides an overview of Philips's career and life, probing the issue of her lack of posthumous popularity.]

With the emergence of feminist criticism has come the reconstruction of history; and with this reconstruction, the awareness that many women writers and thinkers have been forgotten in a largely male canon--some purposefully suppressed; others, consistently allowed, perhaps encouraged, to drop out of the sweep of recorded history and out of the anthologies of intellectual and literary ideas.¹ Opponents of feminist criticism in literature, history, and religion, often point out that important women have held high places in society and have been honored by their peers--Sappho, Queen Elizabeth, Julian of Norwich, Hilda of Whitby and the like. But these same critics point less enthusiastically to bright women once admired but now largely neglected. Such women in the latter category are the eighteenth-century poet, Elizabeth Singer Rowe² (1674-1737) and our present study in this reprint, the seventeenth-century poet, Katherine Philips³ (1631-1664).

Playing what she considered the proper role of a lady, perhaps participating in something of a genteel literary tradition, Katherine Philips was self-deprecating, as Louise Bernikow, editor of The World Split Open, notes when citing Philips' own comment: "She who never writ any line in my life with an intention to have it printed. ..."⁴ She was apparently horrified that her poems had been published in 1664 without her permission and had the publisher recall the book. It is, though, difficult to assess from this distance Philips' self-expressed modesty--whether it be aristocratic convention, genuine humility, or a necessary protection of her own femininity. An interesting footnote to the episode is that several of her more satirical and feminist poems were not among those included in the 1664 edition.

The editor of The Whole Duty of a Woman cites this passage:

"... sometimes I think that to make verses is so much above my reach, and a diversion so unfit for the sex to which I belong, that I am about to resolve against it forever."⁵

Why, though, would one so retiring allow her translation of a Corneille play to be produced in Ireland to large audiences and public notoriety? She is largely removed from the political world of her day, though she does write on several political issues, one of which was the murder of King Charles I, an interesting feminist issue in itself given her husband's M.P. status while she remained a royalist during the Interregnum.

She was close to influential men of the times and was destined, as it were, for publication. While her subject matter is not largely public, her literary world is nonetheless a real one--the real world of tenderness among friends, some men, mostly women, and the hushed world of love between women. The literary world which Katherine Philips creates and herself as Orinda inhabits--is a vastly interesting one, and one not so free of questions and controversy as one might imagine of a "private" woman poet whose primary topic is the seemingly neutral topic of friendship.

Her Life

Katherine Fowler, born New Year's Day, 1631, was the daughter of a London merchant named John Fowler and his wife Katherine Oxenbridge, herself the daughter of Dr. John Oxenbridge, a Presbyterian and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.⁶ Like Janus, namesake of the month of her birth, Katherine was herself to look both backwards and forwards--backwards to a world dominated by male education and letters; forward to her own considerable notoriety as a well-educated woman, poet, translator, and serious friend. A student at the well-known boarding school at Hackeny, Katherine was apparently a child prodigy who was encouraged and well educated. Numerous sources mention her interest in scripture, languages, and writing from an early age.

After the death of her father, Katherine's mother married Hector Philips, the father of James Philips. In 1647 Katherine would become, at seventeen, the second wife of James, a member of parliament; hence Katherine spent part of her time in London and part in Wales at the Philips' home, at the Old Priory, Cardigan. At Hackney school, Katherine probably began to write her verses as apparently her grandmother Oxenbridge had done as a youth, but it was at her pastoral home in Cardigan where she wrote and intellectually, if not physically, presided over her Society of Friendship, in part a coterie of actual friends and in part a literary convention modeled on classical rules of friendship.

Besides her interest in writing, she was also keenly interested in religion. Born into a Presbyterian family, she seriously studied scripture and ecclesiastical affairs, often seeking discussion and debate on theological issues. John Aubrey, that purveyor of noteworthy lives, records that "When a child, she was mighty apt to learn ... she had an excellent memory and could have brought away a sermon in her memory."⁷ Eventually, despite her background, she herself came to appreciate the Church of England and was moved to consult one of its most eminent divines: in the 1650s, she wrote a query to Jeremy Taylor, sometime resident in Wales during the Interregnum, who had been chaplain to King Charles I and who, after the Restoration of King Charles II, was named Bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland. She also knew Dr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist and poet, of Breconshire, Wales.⁸

Her inquiry to Taylor is enshrined--I trust close to her own words--in Taylor's "Discourse on the Nature and Offices of Friendship," first published in 1657.⁹ Mrs. Philips' question, as we have it in Taylor's "Discourse," is, "How far a dear and perfect friendship is authorized by the principles of Christianity?"¹⁰ This question alone, we are led to believe, occasioned Taylor's long and lovely essay on friendship in which he argues as a Christian humanist for the virtues of particular friendships, that is, friendships between close personal friends, as opposed to the more generally applied concept of friendliness toward all which one might deduce from reading the New Testament. Taylor, in his casuistic, moderately latitudinarian manner, assures Mrs. Philips, and other readers, that it is not against Christian teachings for people to have, hold, and nurture particular friendships such as the ancients extolled. His eloquent response must have delighted Katherine Philips, and no doubt countless others who read it after publication.¹¹

Through her Society of Friends and through her manuscripts, which no doubt circulated among friends, Philips became well known, widely read, and eventually praised by noted literary contemporaries. Her successful translations of Corneille's plays and acclaimed productions in Dublin, as well as the popularity of a number of poems, brought her attention and endorsement, but unfortunately this talented, interesting woman died of smallpox at the age of thirty-three while in London.

Her son, only forty days old, had died in 1647 and is memorialized in one of her loveliest poems, a sonnet, "Orinda Upon Little Hector Philips." Her daughter, Katherine, born in 1656, lived and later married Lewis Wogan of Pembrokeshire. Mrs. Katherine Philips was buried in St. Benet's, Sherehog, London, as was her baby son Hector. The church, formerly dedicated to St. Osyth's, was burned during the Great Fire of 1666.

A Seventeenth-Century Tradition of Friendship

In ancient Greece and Rome, friendship was seriously studied and practiced as a primary virtue and was often seen as the true end of philosophy, the love of wisdom, the love of the good. Writers and thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus wrote extensively on the topic of friendship, but these thinkers saw friendship as a relationship, often intellectual, to be enjoyed and practiced between men. It was a question whether a woman was fit to be a friend or a fit recipient of friendship, at least in the elevated context of philosophy. Authentic friendship was the province of men.

In the more strictly-defined literary tradition, Homer shows numerous examples of male friendship, Patroclus and Achilles, for example, from the Iliad, and in the Odyssey. Louise Bernikow, in her section on friends in Among Women traces a male tradition of friendship in the context of war and competition and compares that tradition with a tradition of female friendship in Sappho and Katherine Philips.¹²

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe, much the same positions held among those who wrote on friendship--that high or philosophical friendship was a masculine enterprise, though in the Renaissance, the intelligence and role of women in society was increasingly acknowledged by such writers as Castiglione and Thomas More. Indeed, the great international scholar and Christian humanist, Erasmus, satirizes the decadence of male intelligence and governance and by implication other conventions of society--in his "Abbot and the Learned Woman."¹³

Interestingly, during the English Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, friendship again emerges as a serious philosophical study and practice. Although Aelred of Rivaulx had written his book, Spiritual Friendship, in the Middle Ages,¹⁴ his work was for friends within the monastic community. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, we see the concern with friendship as both intellectual idea and human relationship: Writers such a Montaigne¹⁵ on the continent and Bacon¹⁶ in England wrote essays on the subject; and friendship was a favorite topic of biblical commentators of the day (citing the Old Testament David and the New Testament Christ, and others as examples of those who fostered particular friendship), as well as popular writers on morals and manners. Richard Allessee, for example, devotes several pages in the best-selling Whole Duty of a Man¹⁷ to friendship and its rightful exercise. Jeremy Taylor's lengthy essay extends the metaphor of friendship as foundation for all human relations, even civilization itself.

Devoting both her life and her writing to friendship, Katherine Philips begins a quiet intellectual revolution in her Welsh country home: as a woman she not only invades the male world of letters but the male subject matter of serious, virtuous, philosophical friendship. In so doing, she shows considerable talent as a poet and knowledge of the classics and of scripture, creating both her own neo-classical world of ideas and a new spiritually based on classical and Christian precepts.

Her inquiry to Jeremy Taylor showed to what extent she took Christianity seriously, and it showed as well her high seriousness over particular, that is personal, friendships. Furthermore, her poems focus almost exclusively on female friendship, showing that women make worthy friends and are worthy recipients of friendship. As Bernikow puts it, she picks up where Sappho left off: this high estate of female friendship becomes love in many poems. It is also its own religion.

Just as Philips' stance of humility is open to debate and interpretation, so is the sexuality expressed in her poetry. The World Split Open maintains that her expression of love of woman for woman is as threatening to some critics as was Shakespeare's expression of love for the young boy in his sonnets. Harriette Andreadis argues for a Lesbian interpretation,¹⁸ while Angeline Goreau of The Whole Duty of a Woman sees Philips as an intellectual who has digested her classics and shows women to be subjects of philosophical virtue.

Both readings are credible; the poems are indeed sensual, tender, and affectionate, yet they are definitely intellectual exercises as well. However the reader responds, the point not to be forgotten is that Philips, the "English Sappho," has broken convention and has challenged the male hold on serious, virtuous friendship. As Goreau points out, for Philips "friendship was a platonic ideal, a sacred connection between persons, far removed from the sphere of the merely sexual. Katherine Philips defined it as 'love refin'd and purg'd from all its dross.' The rejection of the possibility of sex frees Philips to express her feelings far more passionately than she might otherwise have done."¹⁹ Others with differing sensibilities will obviously disagree and perhaps even see her sexuality and passion as that which engages her in the equally passionate intellectual celebration of women.

While we do not know for sure which of the ancients--Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero--she may have read or was sharply aware of, we can assume that she knew platonic or neo-platonic ideas: her uses of classical names, allusions, and Latin phrases shows us her love of the classical world. Though her poetry is more abstract and less physical and concrete than Sappho's, she nonetheless echoes the classical world of Sappho, especially the world of female affections.

She may also have been well read in what I would call the seventeenth-century neo-classical school of friendship. Many people wrote on friendship, as was noted above, and Katherine Philips may have known Montaigne's essay, "Of Friendship," which had been translated into English by John Florio in 1603, though as a translator of Corneille's plays, Mrs. Philips had no need of Englished versions of French writers. She may well have read the considerable section on friendship in the popular handbook of the day, Whole Duty of a Man (1655); or, given her interest in scripture, she may have read any one of numerous and widely-available biblical glosses and commentaries on "friends" and "friendship." Her letter to Jeremy Taylor occasioned one of the greatest contributions to the neo-classical school of friendship, and her own poetry provides the single-most consistent devotion to the topic in the seventeenth century.

The delightful outcome of her learning we find in her considerable volume of poetry, running to two hundred forty-two pages in the small, handbook-sized 1664 edition and to one hundred ninety-eight pages in the larger, folio-sized 1667 edition which also included another one hundred twelve pages of Corneille translations. The poems, in both "first" editions, the unauthorized 1664 and the posthumous 1667, are largely on the classical theme of friendship and on the Society of Friendship which has assured her place in literary history.

Her Society of Friendship

There has been much controversy over the exact nature and meaning of Philips' Society of Friendship. Was it an actual gathering, salon perhaps, of friends? Was the Society all female, or were males allowed? Was the Society an intellectualization, an imagined, classical "school" of the poet's mind?

As Philip Souers, her biographer says, we have not really much more evidence than that which Katherine Philips herself gives us; therefore, many questions still tickle us. The best guess seems to be that the Society was largely imaginary, though partially a coterie of actual friends. Some see in it a projection of repressed, or perhaps fulfilled, Lesbian desires.

An older generation of literary historians, in particular George Saintsbury, saw the Society of Friendship as the whim of a harmless woman: "the whole thing (the classical names and Society of Friendship) is a sort of 'side show' to the Heroic entertainment which is one of the reasons it does not appear that 'Antenor' [Katherine's husband] objected, or that he had any reason to object."²⁰ Indeed, the use of classical names is playful; however, the scorn of 'side show' is excessive. As Louise Bernikow points out, Katherine Philips is the first woman since Sappho who wrote of love of women and who used classical themes; her writings are, therefore, a true treasure of literary history and of women's history and philosophy.

Philip Souers is himself doubtful about the reality of the Society as a salon holding meetings; however, he correctly sees Orinda's (Katherine's name for herself in the poems) classical penchant in its more serious philosophical setting in the history of ideas: "For Orinda friendship had a peculiar meaning. It was the Platonic mingling of souls; it had about it a certain mysticism, which made it a kind of religion to be realized only by initiation into its esoteric knowledge. Such a friendship, limited as it was in Orinda's eyes to persons of the same sex, was an ideal which lent itself easily to the inspiration of a society."²¹ Souers cites her poem, "Friendship in Embleme, or the Seal. To my Dearest Lucasia." (29) and concludes, along with the poem's conclusion that the Society was that which "will transmit to Fame / Lucasia and Orinda's Name."

In Chapter III, "Friends and Friendship" of his book, Souers cites Edmund Gosse and George Bethune who gave credence to Orinda's "Society" in the 1800s, but he himself has many doubts that any real salon or society could have functioned given Katherine Philips' youth (in her 20s), place (living great distances from the women she mentions, in Wales), and times. Hence, Souers affirms the Society as an "official order of Friendship in the kingdom of feminine sensibility."²²

Scant evidence hinders our interpretation of Orinda's Society, but clearly it is a serious idea within the classical and philosophical world of her poetry. Just as she would seem to have a heightened use of the word friendship, so, I believe, she may very well use society as a metaphor for the like-minded, as she uses friendship as an extended metaphor for intimacy.

Her poetry mentions a Society, a seal, and members. Men are also given classical names and epithets in the poems and would seem, at times, to be part of her classical coterie. It is uncertain whether men could "belong" to her Society; Souers thinks not, but cites several male inhabitants of her poetry: Antenor (James Philips), Silvander (Sir Edward Dering), Palaemon (Francis Finch; later, after Finch's death, Jeremy Taylor), and others. Souers is more certain that Ardelia, Philoclea, Regina, and Rosania were actual "members" of Orinda's Society, Regina being most likely Regina Collier, wife of John Collier, friend of John Fowler. Rosania, Souer asserts, was Mary Aubrey, Katherine's oldest friend from school days. Lucasia was Anne Owen, whom most agree was most certainly a member of the Society. Other critics assume male, as well as female membership, in Orinda's Society of Friendship.

No doubt feminist and historical critics will continue to revise the interpretation of the Society: Katherine's attitudes certainly show an aversion to marriages which remove her friends from single-minded attention and affection. Like Sappho, the "English Sappho" waxes both hot and cold in her expressions of affection. Orinda is the mistress who "expels" "members" out of favor and who "initiates" neophytes into the mysteries of the cult of feminine friendship--its own religion, its own laboratory of love.

Her Poetry of Friendship

Along with her colonial counterpart, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips was one of the first women writers in English to have a book of her poetry published. She probably began writing poetic imitations, as was the habit of all schoolchildren of her day. Fond of Henry Vaughan (1622-1695), a native Welshman, she wrote any number of verses after his poetry; in fact her first published works appeared as part of a volume of Vaughan's poetry in 1651 and later that same year, in a collection by Cartwright. She circulated her own poetry in manuscript and became known among the literati in the 1650s and early 1660s.

When she went to Dublin in 1662 she was asked by the Earl of Orrery, later one of the commendors of her unauthorized volume of Poems of 1664, to complete a translation of the playwright Corneille's "Pompee." She did, and the play, produced in 1662, was successful and was printed the next year, 1663, in Dublin and in London. An unauthorized edition of Poems was brought out in 1664 but was suppressed by Marriott, the publisher, at the request of the author. As we noted earlier, despite her deference, she gained in popularity, and at the time of her death in 1664 was a well-known writer. Her verse was collected and published under the direction of Sir Charles Cotterel. This edition of Poems also contained her translation of Corneille's "Horace" as well as "Pompee," both included for textual integrity in this reprint.

Her subject matter is almost exclusively that of personal, particular friends, or that of the concept of friendships. There were seventy-four poems in the unauthorized 1664 edition; some one hundred twenty-three poems, translations, and the plays in the posthumous 1667 edition, of which one hundred sixteen were original poems. Of her one hundred sixteen poems, some twenty are occasional; several are on royal subjects, and several are specifically about religion, though the categories of her poems usually hover between the secular and the theological. Some concern contemporary writers and musicians, such as Henry Vaughan, Henry Lawes, Cartwright, Abraham Cowley, Roger L'Estrange and Jeremy Taylor. Others concern abstract emotions, but the vast majority are on love and its higher manifestation--friendship. She writes in a variety of forms--epistles, prayers, songs, and apostrophes and displays a range of voices, tones, and techniques. Her idiosyncrasies include a love of capitalizations in mid-line and contractions (such as "w'are") not unlike those found in the poems of Thomas Traherne.

When she writes on weather conditions in "On Fair Weather Just at the Coronation," (4) she uses a simile alluding to Israel. In "To Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York," (9) she writes about her own writing. But friendship is a sub-text even when it is not the text of her poetry, as she shows in a variety of cases how the qualities issuing from friendship, or the want of friendship, affect circumstances. For Katherine Philips, wisdom and friendship are one, yet friendship lightens life, as it does in "A Retir'd Friendship, To Ardelia" (22): "Come, my Ardelia to this Bower, / Where kindly mingling Souls Awhile / Let's innocently spend an hour / And at all serious follies smile" (1667, p. 28, 1664, p. 56). The thesis for her poetry might be found in "Lucasia" (27): "Wisdom and Friendship have one single Throne / And make another Friendship of Their own" (1667, p. 35; 1664, p. 67).

Philips' voice has an impressive tonal range. Working primarily in rhymed couplets, she can, as literary historian George Saintsbury said, be uninspiring, certainly to the modern ear, yet at times she sings with an electric vigor that awakens the reader. With echoes of John Donne, she says in "Injuria Anicitiae" (38): "lovely Apostate! What was my offense? or am I punish'ed for Obedience?" (1667, p. 53; 1664, p. 109).

While she may indeed tend toward the poetic of the Restoration period, she is at ease in the world of seventeenth-century philosophical poetry; and at her best exploring what her epistolary friend, Jeremy Taylor, explored with her--the nature and offices of friendship. Regretting, as many a philosopher and essayist has, the poor estate friendship holds in society, Philips writes, in "The Enquiry" (58):

Why are the bonds of Friendship tied
With so remis a knot,
That by the most it is defied
And by the rest forgot?
Why do we step with so light sense
From Friendship to Indifference.

(1667,1667, p. 81; 1664,1664, p. 164)

For Philips, friendship is the highest calling, the noblest office, higher even than marriage--she speaks of the "bonds of friendship" even as Jeremy Taylor in his "Discourse" sees marriage as the epitome of friendship. Philips does not simply examine friendship, she exalts it among human relationships, particularly among women.

Her most frequently cited poems have been "Orinda Upon little Hector Philips" (101) and the one John Keats particularly admired, "To M. A. at parting" (53), and both for good reason. The latter begins with an especially metaphysical zestiness:

I Have examin'd and do find,
Of all that favour me
There's none I grieve to leave behind
But only only Thee.
To part with Thee I needs must die,
Could parting sep'rate Thee and I.

(1667,1667, p. 74; 1664,1664, pp. 150-51)

And reaches a crescendo in stanza 9:

Thus our twin-souls in one shall grow
And teach the World new Love,
Redeem the Age and Sex, and show
A Flame Fate dares not move:
And courting Death to be our friend,
Our Lives together shall end.

(1667,1667, p. 76; 1664,1664, p. 154)

Here she joins Platonic intellect with heartfelt, physical emotion--love of the mind and love of woman for woman.

Her deep affection for her husband and her male friends are seen in such poems as "To the noble Palaemon ..." (12), "To Sir Edward Dering (the noble Silvander) ..." (14), "To Mr. Henry Lawes" (15), "To Mr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist ..." (21), "Mr. Francis Finch ..." (52), and "To my dearest Antenor ..." (54) which develops a lonely metaphysical image of a mirror. And the sorrowful love of her baby son who died is beautifully expressed in "And now (sweet Babe) what can my trembling heart / Suggest to right my doleful fate or thee, / Tears are my Nurse and sorrow all my Art ..." (1667, p. 148), as it is, I think even more poignantly, in "Epitaph on her Son H. P. at St. Syth's Church" (88) which ends

And so the Sun if it arise
Half so glorious as his Eyes,
Like this Infant, take a shroud
Buried in a morning Cloud.

(1667,1667, p. 134)

Her Feminism

Though not always, Philips often writes as a woman to other women about women's issues, at least in many of her poems. Her repeated theme is love elevated to high or serious friendship among women.

Others have or will have to answer questions about her sexuality, about Lesbianism. What is clear is that she champions friendship--of men and women and affection between women, that she does not see marriage as the panacea for women or even the opportunity for happiness, and that she has serious criticism of men mixed in with her high praise of individual men and women.

She champions female bonding in "To the honoured Lady E. C." (45):

You are so much above your Sex, that we
Believe your Life your greatest courtesie:
For Women boast, They have you while you live
A Pattern and a Representative.

(1667,1667, p. 64; 1664,1664,p. 130)

From "Friendship's Mystery ..." (17) we learn that friendly love between women is not prosaic and mundane, is not the ordinary friendship of men, but rather elevated to a cult of love. Again echoing John Donne she writes:

Come, my Lucasia, since we see
That Miracles, Men's faith do more,
By wonders and by prodigy,
To the dull angry world let's prove
There's a Religion in our Love.

(1667,1667, p. 21; 1664,1664, p. 43)

The bonding and the sacredness of female friendship is, moreover, vivifying and nutritive. In actuality, this female bonding is recreative of the individual psyche; it is, in contemporary parlance, self-actualizing. Her poem entitled "Friendship" (57) ends:

United More than Spirits Faculties,
Higher in thought than are the Eagle's eyes;
What shall I say? When we true friends are grown,
W'are alike--Alas, w'are like ourselves alone.

(1667,1667, p. 79; 1664,1664, p. 161)

Her understanding of friendship's role in the process of individuation echoes Aristotle's theories of selflessness among friends and looks forward to modern theories in psychology.²³

As a philosopher, Philips asks the eternal questions concerning human happiness. And like Plato, she finds ultimate satisfaction in the realm of thought and ideas. In a poem to her sister on the occasion of her marriage, Philips issues a caution against the assumption that marriage will make a woman happy. In stanza two of "To My Dear Sister Mrs. C. P. on her Marriage" (20) she writes:

But these shall be my great Solemnities,
Orinda's wishes for Cassandra's bliss.
May her context be as unmix'd and pure
As my Affection, and like that endure.
And that strong Happiness may she still find
Not Owning to her Fortune, but her Mind.

(1667,1667, p. 26; 1664,1664, pp. 52-53)

Philips clearly sees and bluntly states that the intellect is the quality which produces long-lasting happiness, not the fortune of being married. She again celebrates "serious things" (1667, p. 28; 1664, p. 56) in her tribute, "To Mr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist, on his Poems" (21) and in her tribute "To Mr. Henry Lawes" (15) whom she congratulates for "Music to th'Ear, or to the Intellect" and in which she cleverly honors the musician with a musical definition of "Friendship the Unison of well-tun'd Hearts" (1667, p. 18; 1664, p. 37).

She is openly critical of marriage and of the condition marriage reduces women to. She is again quick-witted and sure, perhaps uttering her own experienced wisdom as a woman intellectual in a "man's world"? From "An Answer to another persuading a Lady to Marriage" (108):

Forbear hold Youth, all Heaven here,
And what you do over,
To others Courtship may appear
'Tis Sacrilege to her.
She is a publick Deity,
And were't not very odd
She should depose herself to be
A petty Houshold God?

(1667,1667, p. 155)

In a stinging statement such as this, Philips heightens her literary ingenuity, here alluding to the gods of the temples and the lesser gods of the home in Roman mythology. Seeing the young bride as a goddess, Philips, though, presents her potential marriage as the deposition of a figure worthy of public worship, to become a "petty" god in a domestic niche.

Her criticism of men in general is most caustic (and playful) in "Upon the graving of her Name upon a Tree in Barnelmes Walks" (91):

Trees are More generous Then Men,
Who by a Nobleness so pure
Can first oblige and Then endure

(1667,1667, p. 137).

She can be quick and witty, and humorously ironic. Is "The Virgin" (90) delivered tongue in check?: "A Beauty, not to Art in debt, Rather agreeable than great" (1667, p. 136). One wonders.

As a feminist, Philips' primary poetic aim is the celebration of female affectionate ties, yet she does often contrast the feminine and masculine condition, as in the line from "Content, to my dearest Lucasia" (18): "Men think they have it when they have it not" (1667, p. 22; 1664, p. 45). Paralleling her criticism of men is her exoneration of Eve, the original woman, in the story of the fall from Genesis. Here she delightfully combines a radical reading of Adam and Eve with a blunt condemnation of a person suing her husband. "To Antenor, on a Paper of mine ..." (33):

Must then my Crimes, become thy Scandal too? ...
For Eve's Rebellion did not Adam blast,
Until himself forbidden Fruit did taste?

(1667,1667, p. 147; 1664,1664, á31, p. 91)

As her "crime" has no reality for her husband, so Eve's rebellion against God was solely her own, until Adam decided, on his own, to become involved. Clearly this woman, in her own "June-December" marriage, has strong criticisms of men and the institution of marriage. Her poems are most productively read in the context of the long-standing tradition of friendship as well as the context of her feminism. And yet a third important context emerges.

Her Spirituality

The exalted nature of friendship in Philips' poetic vocabulary derives from her classical savvy, from neo-platonic idealized love in particular; from her obvious affection--physical or imagined--of her close friends; but also from her Christianity. She firmly believes friendship to be both the high virtue of the ancients as well as a blessing from God. For her, friendship is the essential metaphor for expressing God's relation to the created world, to humanity, a metaphor for divine intimacy and an inner life of close, affectionate relationship with God and others.

For Philips, God's miracle of miracles, the Incarnation, is an act of friendship. And throughout her poetry she develops a spirituality of friendship whereby she talks at once about Christian doctrine in a vocabulary of friendship and, then again, of friendship in a decidedly Christian (biblical and doctrinal) vocabulary.

Overlooked by almost all of her critics--historical, literary, and feminist alike--her knowledge and use of Christianity shows Katherine Philips to be a sophisticated theologian in her poetry, focusing as she does time and again on central Christian concerns of harmony in creation and charity in life. As such, she also takes her place with seventeenth-century Christian humanists who see mutual service between the Christian religion and classical wisdom.

In "A Sea-voyage from Tenby to Bristol ..." (16), Philips links the fall of humanity with the theme of friendship:

Behold the fate that all our Glories sweep,
Writ in the dangerous wonders of the Deep;
And yet behold Man's easie folly more,
How soon we curse what erst we did adore.

(1667,1667, p. 20; 1664,1664, p. 41)

Her homage herein to friendship is total; like Taylor in his "Discourse," Philips reckons friends to be as God to her in a given situation. She continues:

My Voyage taught me so much tediousness.
In short, the Heav'ns must needs propitious be,
Because Lucasia was concern'd in me.

(1667,1667, p. 21; 1664,1664, p. 42)

Moreover, she likens friendship to the tensions between fate and free will; she parallels this theological discussion with a charming angelic analogy, in "Friendship's Mystery ..." (17): "For though we were design'd to' agree, / That Fate no liberty destroyes, / But our Election is as free ..." (1667, p. 21; 1664, p. 43). Continuing in stanza four, she writes, "we court our own captivity ... / 'T were banishment to be set free, ..." (1667, p. 22; 1664, p. 44) and concludes in stanza six:

Our Hearts are mutual Victims laid,
While they (such power in Friendship lies)
Are Altars, Priests, and Off'rings made;
And each Heart which thus kindly dies,
Grown deathless by the Sacrifice.

(1667,1667, p. 22; 1664,1664, p. 45)

One of her loveliest and most moving poems, "Friendship's Mystery," explores in stunning imagery of sacrifice the mutuality of friendship. Her piercing sixth stanza, echoing Herbert's "Altar" and Donne's playful admixture of religion and lust in "The Canonization," shows Philips at her metaphysical best. The whole uses the Christian doctrine of election (she was born into a Presbyterian family) and a theology of paradox ("doubled by the loss"; "each Heart which Thus kindly dies, / Grown deathless by the Sacrifice") as overlay and underpinning for its exploration of the mysteries of friendship, subtly alluding to St. Paul's paradoxical "service which is perfect freedom."

Further, in poem 71, "2 Cor.: 5.19 God was in Christ reconciling the World to himself," she shows God's very nature to be that of Friend. The essence of Christianity is God's friendship with that which he created. Here she aligns herself with a tradition of English writers from Aelred of Rivaulx to her contemporary, Jeremy Taylor, who uses friendship as the essential metaphor for understanding God's creative power and sustaining care: "Then God took stand in Christ, studying a way / How to repair the Ruin'd World's decay ... / Felicity? ... / And what still are we, when our King in vain / Begs his lost Rebels to be Friends again? ... What God himself hath made he cannot hate / For 'tis one act to Love and to Create ..." (1667, p. 110; 1664, pp. 214-15).

Humanity's Friendship with God was created--the act of creation and love are one--man rebelled, but God reinitiates the friendship with humanity: "As God with open Arms the World does woe ..." (1667, p. 111; 1664, p. 216) There can be little doubt that for Katherine Philips human friendships are a "type" of this divine relationship. Little doubt that her theology is a strong drive in her affections. In "L'Accord du Bien" (65), her theme is the harmony of creation, another subtext throughout most of her poems: "And hence it is we Friendship call / Not by one Vertue's name but all. / Nor is it when bad things agree / Thought Union, but conspiracy" (1667, p. 99; 1664, p. 197).

For her, friendship takes on Platonic qualities, but that is not the whole picture; friendship is a Christian endeavor as well. Like John Donne, she quite easily treats love and friendship in the terms and language of religion, and she naturally yokes Platonic and Christian ideas. Reiterating harmony of beings once more--a particularly feminine theme?--she begins with this blunt conjecture in "A Friend" (64):

Friendship's an Abstract of this noble Flame,
'Tis Love refin'd and purg'd from all its dross,
The next to Angel's Love, if not the same,
As strong in passion is, though not so gross:
It antedates a glad Eternity
And is an Heaven in Epitome.

(1667,1667, p. 94; 1664,1664, p. 189)

If until recently the love of woman for woman in Philips' poetry has escaped analysis, so has the intellectually religious inner dimensions of her poetry. Whatever her School of Friendship is exactly--coterie, salon, or philosophical ideal--it must also be seen as a spiritual school. She takes her inquiries into friendship seriously and as well, her inquiries into religion.

Notice that in commenting on the private marriage of a friend, Philips excerpts the spiritual truth of "lack" and silence classic themes of the contemplative tradition. Whatever her motive in penning these lines, the spiritual insight is keen in "Rosania's private marriage" (37):

The greatest Actions pass without noise,
And Tumults but prophane diviner Joys
Silence with things transcendent nearest suits ...
The greatest Emperours are serv'd by Mutes.

(1667,1667, p. 52; 1664,1664, p. 106)

Philips' sensitivity to the inner life, the imagination, and to human and divine relationships give her work a true spiritual depth. We have experienced a revival of the spirituality of Julian of Norwich in recent years; we yet await the discovery of Katherine Philips' poetic spirituality.

Her Fate

Why has someone so greatly admired in her own day, with a modest following throughout successive generations--John Keats, for example, greatly admired one of Philips' poems--remained but a "footnote" in seventeenth-century literature anthologies until very recently when she has been included in anthologies of women writers, though quite modestly represented in even most feminist anthologies?

There are no doubt numerous reasons. On a purely literary, historical level, an analogy to the seventeenth-century poet Edmund Waller is perhaps not unfair. Waller, though a man, has not stood the tests of time and taste. Like Waller, Philips was a good poet, a careful crafter, sensitive to versification and meter and conceit; yet in breadth of subject matter and poetic texture not as dynamic as say an Anne Bradstreet.

Yet one wonders, along with Bernikow and others, if Philips' "friendship become love" from woman to woman may not have negatively influenced anthologizers, most of whom were men? One wonders even more why she has been scorned by literary historians who seem to go out of their way to find something negative rather than to highlight her uniqueness in English literary history, her learning, her poetics, and her humor and satire? One still wonders, though, at her relatively "minor" status among womanist and feminist anthologies.

True, she has never dropped totally through the cracks, having been treated in the late 1800s by Edmund Gosse and having received a substantial biography by Philip Souer in 1931, and having made it into the DNB as well as Saintsbury's Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century. Yet time and again, subtle indictments surface, as though "damn'd with faint praise," her efforts kept in the back hallway, as it were, of literary history. As one feminist critic has put it when men write about love it is serious business; when women do the same thing, it is called "sentimental."

The Witherspoon anthology of seventeenth-century literature gives her a couple of paragraphs of introduction and a page of text. The Dictionary of National Biography article on her cites her as a "verse-writer"; interestingly, the equally "minor" Edmund Waller is termed a poet. The entry from the DNB concludes by saying of Katherine Philips that her "fame as a poet [was] always considerably in excess of her merits" and that her fame "did not long survive her. ..."²⁴ George Saintsbury, in the Introduction to her work in his collection at the turn of the century, Minor Poets of the Caroline Period is even less kind:

The poems of 'The Matchless Orinda' are better suited to stand the test on which Joe Gargery apologized for his indulgence at the public house than that on which William Taylor of Norwich judged poetry and was laughed at by Carlyle for judging it. They 'do not overstimulate': On the division of "Quotidian and Stimulant" they approach nearer than to the latter.²⁵

In much the same vein of pomposity, Mr. Saintsbury will allow her entrance into his volumes: "But this is no reason for excluding them from such a collection as this, where some at least of the constituents are rather too much than too little heady." In all fairness, Saintsbury did recognize some of her talents, and he did wish, as I do now, to reintroduce Philips to contemporary readers. He saw her poems as "the settling down of poetry to its more prosaic kinds and expressions about the period of the Restoration."²⁶ Nevertheless, the condescending tone of his Introduction is unnecessary and offensive.

Compare for example these notes from the "Orinda Pamphlet," published in 1904 in Hull which also recognizes Philips' limitations to those comments above of Saintsbury on her poetics:

From "Orinda Pamphlet":

Theory and habit were one with Katherine Philips ... Her plain lyre was one of the newest pattern, in time with Waller's, Denham's and Cowley's almost anticipating the Augustan precisions ... the borderlands or prose. But we must take'Orinda' as she is, with her somewhat amateur energy, her rough contractions and elisions, her pretty and effective artistic bravado.²⁷

Her Publishing History

"The Matchless Orinda," Katherine Philips, as we have noted, eschewed publication. The first edition of her poetry, an unauthorized and no doubt hastily printed one, came out the same year as her death, Poems 1664: the second edition (the first authorized), in 1667, "to which is added ... Corneille's Pompey and Horace, tragedies with several other translations out of French," edited by Sir Charles Cotterell, M.P. from Cardigan. The imprimatur of the first authorized edition is under the signature of Roger L'Estrange, August 20, 1667; the commendatory poems are by Abraham Cowley. From the 1667 preface: "We might well have called her the English SAPPHO, she of all the female Poets of former ages, being for her Verses and Vertues both, the most highly to be valued; but she has called herself ORINDA, a name that deserves to be added to the number of the muses, and to live with honor as long as they." The edition is commended by the literati of the day, a rather impressive list: the Earl of Orrery, the Earl of Roscommon, Abraham Cowley, Philo-Philippa, James Tyrell, and Thomas Flatman, M.A. There also follows a commendatory poem, "On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips" by Abraham Cowley, whose name alone gives the edition serious contemporary literary credibility.

After the 1664 and 1667 editions of her poems followed numerous editions of her work. Often under her own pen name, "Orinda," Katherine Philips, like Edmund Waller, was admired, and for some time following her death, editions of her Poems continued to be reprinted. After the 1664 and 1667 editions came others in 1669, 1678, and 1710; selections in Poems by Eminent Ladies, 1755 and 1757, and inclusion in collections such as A Collection of Divine Hymns and Poems by the Earl of Roscommon ... Mrs. Katherine Philips, etc., of 1709. She is also the subject of The Poetical Remains of the Duke of Buckingham, Madam Philips, etc., 1698. She was later included in G. E. B. Saintsbury's Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, vol. 1, 1905 and Selected Poems were reprinted in Cottingham, near Hull, by J. R. Tutin in 1904 and as well in the "Orinda Booklets," no. 1, 1903. J. R. Tutin also printed Four Early English Poetesses as a "Hull Booklet," no. 7, in 1908.

As late as Keats (1795-1821) we find that the "Matchless Orinda" was read and admired by the best of English poets, who wrote admiringly of her poem "Mrs. M.A. at parting" in an 1817 letter to J.H. Reynolds. More recently, she has become widely anthologized in collections of women writers, notably The World Split Open, the Penguin Book of Women Poets, The whole Duty of a Woman, and the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, and other collections focusing on women's issues and literature. She has also begun to receive attention from a younger generation of feminist scholars and has been the subject of scholarly papers at literary and women's studies conferences.

Katherine Philips in the British Library

Poems ... to which is added ... Jacob Tonson: London, 1710.

Poems ... to which is added ... London, 1710.

Poems, etc. G.E.B. Saintsbury. Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, vol. 1, 1905.

Poems by eminent ladies, etc., 1755 (vol. 2).

Poems by eminent ladies, etc., 1775 (vol. 2, pp. 179-94).

Selected Poems. Katherine Philips, "The Matchless Orinda." Cottingham, near Hull, 1904.

Selected Poems [With an "appreciatory note" by L. I. G., i.e., L. I. Guiney], p. 48, 1904. The Orinda Booklets, no. 1, 1903.

From Early English Poetesses. J.R. Tutin. Hull Booklets, no. 7, 1908.

The Poetic Remains of the Duke of Buckingham, Madam Philips, 1698.

A Collection of divine Hymns and Poems ... by the E. of Roscommon ... Mrs. Katherine Philips, etc., 1709.

Letters. Wilmot. Earl of Rochester. Familiar Letters, etc., 1697.

Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus [Sir Charles Catherell], 1705.

This facsimile is the 1667 edition of Poems, from Yale University Library.

Conclusion

Katherine Philips' subject matter, limited though it may be by comparison to some poets, may have been her downfall in literary history, yet it is this very subject matter which challenges us to consider her anew today. Philips' merits rest not solely on her sex but on her unique treatment of subjects such as friendship, especially among women, and her occasional poems on marriage, departures, deaths, and admirations.

As it turns out, Katherine Philips has a broader range of subjects than has heretofore been acknowledged. In what I take to be her appreciation of Taylor's "Discourse," "To the noble Palaemon [Jeremy Taylor], on his incomparable Discourse on Friendship" (12), she notes that Taylor too reckons friendship "Means and Angels bliss" and she asks of Taylor, "Whether we owe more to thy Brain or Heart" (1667, p. 15; 1664, p. 31). Surely we may ask the same of her poetry. In his Discourse, Taylor had argued that women could most certainly be friends--in the high and serious sense of Philips' inquiry and of his own essay. Isn't at least a part of the irony of Katherine Philips' fate in the anthologies and in English literary history that she indeed had anticipated Taylor, treating friendship as a metaphor for intimacy and a muse for her own form of Christian humanism?

Notes

¹For a good general statement on this subject, see Toni M. Frank, "Women's History Takes Giant Strides," Kathryn Kisk Sklar (Interview); University of California Clip Sheet (Berkeley, Cal.), vol. 57, no. 21 (February 23, 1981), n.p. For specific interpretations of Katherine Philips, see Bernikow, Gilbert and Guber, Goreau, Andreadis, and others cited below.

²The Miscellaneous Works in prose and verse of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe. ... 2 vols. (London, 1739).

³Poems By the incomparable Mrs. K. P. (J. G. for R. Marriott, 1664). See also Poems ... to which is added ... Corneille's Pompey and Horace, tragedies. With several other translations out of French. (J. M. for H. Herringham: London, 1867).

⁴Louise Bernikow, The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552-1950. (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 22.

⁵Angeline Goreau, The Whole Duty of a Woman (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1985), p. 15.

⁶See "Philips, Katherine," Dictionary of National Biography. Edited by Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee. Vol. XV. (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 1063-1064. (DNB in later references.)

⁷John Aubrey, Brief Lives (Oxford, 1989), 2:153-54, in Goreau, p. 193.

⁸See my series of articles on Dr. Henry Vaughan in The Living Church: "Henry Vaughan, Nature Poet," "Henry Vaughan, Silurist," "Henry Vaughan, Mystic Correspondent," "Poet of the Second Race," and "Henry Vaughan, Christian Poet," vol. 199, nos. 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 (Sept. 3, 10, 17, 24, and Oct. 1, 1989).

⁹See The Measures and Offices of Friendship (1662) by Jeremy Taylor. A Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by Travis DuPriest. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1985.

¹⁰Jeremy Taylor, A Discourse of the Nature, offices, and Measures of Friendship, with rules of conducting it. Written in answer to a letter from M. K. P., 1657. See also The Measures and Offices of Friendship ...

¹¹Contemporary feminist critic Louise Bernikow, however, sees in Taylor's essay a distasteful use of male imagery: Louise Bernikow, "Friends," in Among Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 122-23, citing the use of knife imagery with its attendant phallicism. Harriette Andreadis also sees Taylor's response as unsatisfactory; see footnote 18.

¹²See Louise Bernikow, "Friends," Among Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 116-25. Bernikow briefly traces the tradition of masculine literary friendship from the Iliad to modern times, showing links between war and honor and male friendship. While the discussion is helpful in placing Katherine Philips in the literary tradition of female friendship going back to Sappho, her point about Taylor's phallicism (knife imagery), though certainly true, is deflecting, in that Taylor was quite supportive of Philips and of the importance, even religious nature, of friendship. Nor does she cite male writers from antiquity, like Aristophanes who satirizes males and war, or Archilichus who shows us a very different picture from Homer of men in the ancient world. Nevertheless, this overview is interesting and helpful, particularly in tracing a literary tradition of female friendship.

¹³Erasmus, Omnia Opera D. Erasmi. Froben Basileae, 1540. See also "The Abbott and the Learned Lady" as presented in The Humanities, vol. I (New York: D. C. Heath, 1985).

¹⁴Aelred of Rivaulx, Opera Omnia, ope studio, R.P., 1618.

¹⁵Michael Montaigne, Essais de Messire Montaigne. 2 vols. S. Millanges: Bourdeaux, 1580. See also The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. by John Florio. G. Routledge: London, 1886 and The Essays. ... V. Sims: London, 1603.

¹⁶Francis Bacon, The Essaies of Sir Francis Bacon Knight, the Kings Solliciter Generall, John Beale: London, 1612.

¹⁷Richard Allessee, The Whole Duty of a Man, 1655. See The Whole Duty of a Man. Dublin, 1812.

¹⁸Harriette Andreadis, "The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1989, vol. 15, no. 11, pp. 34-60.

¹⁹Goreau, p. 201.

²⁰George Saintsbury, Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), p. 487.

²¹Philip W. Souers, The Matchless Orinda (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 41.

²²Souers, p. 44. See also Edmund Gosse, Seventeenth-Century Studies (London, 1914), pp. 208 and 229-58 and Among Women, p. 121 and L. I. G., "Appreciatory Note," "Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda," The Orinda Booklets, No. 1 (Hull, 1904), p. 5. Souers, pp. 44-45.

²³See Louise Bernikow, Among Women, pp. 116-25 for a discussion of female friendship. See footnote 12.

²⁴DNB, p. 1064.

²⁵Saintsbury, p. 486.

²⁶Saintsbury, p. 487.

²⁷"Appreciatory Note," The Orinda Booklets, p. 8.

Source: Travis DuPriest, Introduction to Poems: 1667, by Katherine Philips, pp. 3-25. Delmar, New York: Scholars