Critic: Stella P. Revard

Source: Representing Women in Renaissance England, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, pp. 227-41. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.

[(essay date 1997) In the following essay, Revard compares critiques by male contemporaries of Philips and Aphra Behn.]

In 1683, Triumphs of Female Wit appeared on the London scene, a slender volume that contained three Pindaric odes and a "Preface to the Masculine Sex" defending the right of women to pursue learning and most especially to use their wit to compose poetry. The first ode, "The Emulation," purports to be "Written by a Young Lady" and argues the case for female poets, maintaining that "the Muses gladly will their aid bestow, / And to their Sex their charming Secrets show" (5).¹ The ode following, ascribed to a Mr. H, challenges not only the rights the Young Lady claims for her sex but also her temerity in claiming these rights in a poetic form reserved, he asserts, for masculine composition.

What daring Female is 't who thus complains,
In Masculine Pindarick Strains,
Of great Apollo's Salique Laws,
Both breaks it, and pretends that she
Pleads only for her Native Liberty.

(6)

It is not astonishing that a gentleman-poet of this era should argue against female rights, but it is rather astonishing that he should carry his argument even to the point of denying a specific verse form to females, claiming Pindaric ode and its poet (Pindar) for an all male preserve of pure poetry. We might ask indeed whether Mr. H's words are only an address to the presumptuous Young Lady of the Pindaric or whether in truth he was aiming his objections at one of the most celebrated women poets of the 1680s, a poet who was in fact employing Pindarics for a wide range of her verses, which were on many occasions as diverse as saluting fellow poets on their work to addressing compliments to the king himself. The woman poet was, of course, Aphra Behn, not only the leading poet-playwright of her time but also, following in the footsteps of Abraham Cowley, its leading Pindarist.

With the publication of his Pindarique Odes in 1656, Cowley largely invented the genre as it came to be practiced in the seventeenth century. His odes in irregular metrical patterns and irregularly numbered stanzas or sections were free imitations of the ancient Greek poet, and in the posthumous Works published in 1668 became his favorite form of address to a poetic subject. Two of his 1668 Pindarics were directed, in fact, to Katherine Philips, the first in commendation of her poems, the second commemorating her death. That both poems use the Pindaric genre to celebrate a woman poet is not without interest to us, for both Pindarics raise many of the same questions about women and poetry that the 1683 volume, Triumphs of Female Wit, raises--that is, the acceptability of a woman pursuing learning and contesting in the domain of poetry that had been almost exclusively male.

Katherine Philips's success as a poet is one of the arguments that Mr. F, the writer of the third Pindaric in the collection, uses to assert that women should be permitted access, along with males, to learning since they could be, like Philips--that is, Orinda--successful as poets. Mr. F, adopting a female persona in this Pindaric, pleads: "Did good Apollo e're deny / Charms to Orinda's Poetry?" (13). In both his Pindarics Cowley ostensibly takes the same position on Philips and her poetry. He has come, after all, to praise and to use the Pindaric medium to render that praise.² But the very questions that he raises about Philips and her poetry illustrate the difficulty that a male poet has in praising a woman who is neither a mistress nor a patron nor a sovereign, but is, rather, a so-called peer in the poetic profession. In assessing the acceptability of a woman as a poetic equal, Cowley faces some of the same stumbling blocks that the three Pindaric poets grapple with in Triumphs of Female Wit. A man's view of a "learned" woman almost always involves a man's view of women in general, and assessment of her literary achievement cannot take place without considering the acceptability of her competing "equally" in the domain of poetic performance. At stake is more than the man's monopoly of wit. For if a man and a woman compete in a literary contest and he "loses," as a man he also loses the right to dominate in other areas. This is precisely what the Young Lady of the Female Wit volume argues.

For should we understand as much as they,
They fear their Empire might decay.
For they know Women heretofore
Gain'd Victories, and envied Laurels wore:
And now they fear we'll once again
Ambitious be to reign
And to invade the Dominions of the Brain.

(2)

I do not doubt Cowley's real admiration for Katherine Philips nor the cordial relations between the two poets. Katherine Philips, after all, visited Cowley in his retirement at Chertsey and addressed a commendatory Pindaric to him, "Upon Mr. Abraham Cowley's Retirement" (Poems [London, 1667], 122-24). She not only expressed admiration for him as a man and poet but also conferred the additional compliment by addressing her words in a medium--the Pindaric--that Cowley had made his own.³ In a way Cowley's Pindarics to Philips merely return the compliment in kind. I also recognize that the effusiveness of Cowley's address to Philips is part and parcel of the genre of commendatory poetry in the seventeenth century. In a genre marked by extravagance--a genre practiced by both male and female poets--it is difficult to sift out the sincere from the overweening compliment. But at issue here is not whether Cowley liked Katherine Philips and admired her poetry. Jean Loiseau contends convincingly that Cowley appreciated her virtue, her hatred of vice and ugliness, and her cultivation of pure and disinterested friendship.⁴ But did he truly regard her, as both his poems say, as his equal as a poet? For this is the question: How was the female poet accepted vis-à-vis the male poet as a fellow practitioner of poetry? Was there a real equality in the arts? Not only Cowley but also the other poets who address poems to Philips maintain there was. Should we believe them?

Cowley's first Pindaric to Philips was one of two commendatory poems printed in the 1664 edition of Philips's Poems; it was reprinted together with the funeral ode in the 1667 edition of Poems along with a preface on her works and with other commendations of Philips by the earl of Orrery, the earl of Roscommon, Philo-Philippa, James Tyrrell, and Thomas Flatman--Tyrrell's and Flatman's odes were also in Pindarics.⁵ All of the commendatory poems, even that of Philo-Philippa--allegedly the only female voice--remark on Philips's sex as well as her status as a poet. It seems an unavoidable issue. None praise her simply as a poet. Like these other commendatory poems, Cowley's Pindarics begin by looking at the woman first. The issue of sex becomes so important a motif that the assessment of Philips as a poet takes second place. But in this he is representative of most of Philips's male admirers; it was apparently almost impossible in this era to be gender blind. Further, both of Cowley's Pindarics emphasize the rivalry between men and women poets as well as the rivalry between men and women. Beauty and wit are the themes, and they are interconnected.

Almost inevitably involved in any consideration of a literary contest between men poets and women poets is that of the amatory contest between men and women, a contest in which men traditionally award the victory to women. As Cowley noted in his anacreontic "Beauty," when women contest with men in affairs of love, their advantage of beauty allows them to carry the day. No need for them to put on arms in the contest of love; they win without them:

Who can, alas, their strength express,
Arm'd, when they themselves undress,
Cap-a-pe with Nakedness?

(ll. 21-23)⁶

What happens, however, when women seek to dominate in that other contest too? In his first ode, "On Orinda's Poems," Cowley simply extends the amatory to the literary contest, protesting that men who have been constrained to submit to Woman's beauty must now--in the case of Orinda--submit to her wit:

We allow'd You Beauty, and we did submit
To all the Tyrannies of it;
Ah! Cruel Sex, will you depose us too in Wit?
Orinda does in that too raign,
Does Man behind her in Proud Triumph draw,
And Cancel great Apollo's Salick Law.

(1:1-6)⁷

While connecting these two "supposed" contests appears at first to confer a gracious compliment, it actually limits the woman that it seems to praise, linking her wit to her beauty and confining her to a sphere where she is judged as a woman first and a poet second. Throughout this poem and its sequel, "On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips," Cowley never passes beyond the easy compliment to Philips's beauty and the virtues of her sex to evaluate the quality and substance of her poetry. The funeral Pindaric opens, like the ode "On Orinda's Poems," with a reference to Philips's beauty, deploring (as Dryden later deplored in his Pindaric for Anne Killigrew) that the smallpox that killed her assaulted first "The Throne of Empress Beauty, ev'n the Face" (1:8) before it overthrew "th' inward Holiest Holy of her Wit" (1:19). The funeral Pindaric is a lament for Philips's death; the first Pindaric, written when Philips was alive, purports, however, to be on Orinda's poetry, not on Orinda. Some of the other commendatory poems of the 1667 volumes at least mention one or another of Philips's works (often the ambitious translations of Corneille); Cowley makes no direct reference to either Philips's poetry or her translations.

Whereas it is not rare for commendatory poems to focus on the person, rather than on the work, Cowley in his complimentary poems to male writers and artists pays attention to the work also. When he addresses an ode to Thomas Hobbes, it is not Hobbes's virtue and wit that he praises, but Hobbes's accomplishment in having brought philosophy beyond the age of Aristotle into the modern era. Similarly, his Pindaric to Dr. Harvey may begin with an elaborate and showy amatory myth. But Cowley in comparing Harvey to Apollo pursuing Daphne is alluding to Harvey's scientific work, not to his amorous adventures. Like Apollo, Harvey pursued a Daphne-Nature until she revealed "her" secrets to him. The comparison leads us not to the man but to the scientist. In his poem "On the Death of Sir Anthony Vandike, the famous Painter" (Miscellanies, 9), Cowley is quite specific in applauding Van Dyke's excellence in drawing, considering the artist first, before he comments on the virtue of the man:

His All-resembling Pencil did out-pass
The mimick Imag'ry of Looking-glass,
Nor was his Life less perfect than his Art,
Nor was his Hand less erring than his Heart

(ll. 15-18)

All these complimentary poems to men are extravagant; but all look at the artist, the writer, the scientist first, then at the man. But in his odes to Katherine Philips, he never lets us forget that we are looking at best at a most curious phenomenon--a woman who writes. Both odes dwell therefore on the qualities that most properly characterize woman: above all, beauty and virtue first and then wit--female wit.

In the first Pindaric, Cowley launches a witty protest that women possess an unfair advantage over men merely because they are women; their sex alone confers beauty, virtue, and fecundity--all female qualities. Now, in aspiring to wit, women conspire to take away the weapon that amorous male poets have used in the battlefield of love to secure themselves against women's natural advantages. The contest of the sexes is an antique one--going back at least to Ovid and his taking arms against the all conquering mistress and her artillery of beauty. Cowley tells us that Orinda has turned this contest topsy-turvy, now taking arms against men in the contest of wit too and, winning that, "she / Turn'd upon Love himself his own Artillery" (1:17). How seriously should we take this poetic sparring? These witty protests are little different from those the beaux of Restoration comedy use against the supposedly triumphant belles; Cowley has only removed the amatory combat to the realm of poetry. The compliments Cowley confers on Philips resemble those that Congreve's Mirabell resigns to Millamant. When Fainall comments, for example, that Millamant has wit, Mirabell retorts, "She has Beauty enough to make any Man think so; and Complaisance enough not to contradict him who shall tell her so" (The Way of the World, 1:i).⁸ Apropos of this question of beauty and wit (but now on the subject of male and female poets), another quotation of Congreve springs to mind. In his "Notes on Ovid's Art of Love" Congreve once more resorts to an allusion to women's beauty as a measure for her wit, commenting on the rivalry between Pindar and the ancient Greek poetess Corinna, "who as we are told won the Prize of Poetry four or five Times from Pindar; however those that say so, own her Beauty contributed much to that Advantage."⁹ We must be suspicious, therefore, of any reference to women's wit that couples it with an aside on her beauty. Cowley has done this consistently in the first two sections of the Pindaric. In section 3, when he appears at last to be discussing Philips's poetry--"thy well knit sense, / Thy numbers gentle, and thy Fancies high" (3:4-5)--he gives all away by once more linking Philips's poetic skills to her beauty, as he completes the rhyme: "Those as thy forehead smooth, these sparking as thine eye" (6).¹⁰ This courtly game confers apparent victory on women but reserves real power for men. By the very wit of his own verse, Cowley has demonstrated that neither Orinda nor any other female poet can carry away the laurels in a real contest of wit. Cowley retains supremacy, even as he "says" he gives it away.

Another issue in this contest between men and women is the question of women's "natural" creativity. Should you not be content, Cowley asks Philips, that Mother Cybele has made you fecund of womb (the sex's natural prerogative), but must you aspire to exceed men in being fecund of brain--men's (he would imply) natural prerogative. Again Cowley appears to award Philips supremacy in creative intellect, as in wit, as he comments how easily she brings forth the children of her brain. She has as many literary offspring as the prolific "Holland Countess" has children. But is it praise of a poet's prolific production to link it to another female's fecundity in the proper female sphere of reproduction? The comparison of these two kinds of "production" reminds us of one of the basic issues this age and those that follow often pondered: should women exercise creativity beyond the domestic sphere? Nature gave woman creative energy for the procreation of children, which, when employed elsewhere, may threaten that natural creativity. Mr. H in Triumphs of Female Wit reminds the Young Lady of Nature's true design for women's creative impulses: "But sure she ne're designed it / To make your Brains prolifick, or your wit" (7). Cowley never directly criticizes Philips's prolific production of poetry; he doesn't have to. Merely raising the question is enough to remind us that a woman's prolificacy can be misplaced.

Cowley reserves, however, as men traditionally do, his greatest praises for Philips's virtue. So preeminent is she in virtue that she wins through it victory not only over male poets but also over all previous female competitors:

Orinda's inward virtue is so bright,
That like a Lanthorn's fair inclosd Light,
It through the Paper shines where she do's write.

(4:7-9)

At this point Cowley comes as close as he ever does to commenting on Philips's poetry. He praises her mastery of the themes of "Honour and Friendship"; these are the "instructive Subjects of her pen" (4:14). But even here he is qualifying his praise, for he is suggesting that it is Philips's preeminence in virtue--woman's proper sphere--that makes her acceptable as a poet. In a poetical as well as a societal context, a woman may excel in virtue. In teaching "Arts, and Civility," she may be so successful that "she overcomes, enslaves, and betters Men" (4:16-17). Virtue is the highest thing that any woman poet--indeed any woman--can aspire to. In commending Philips's virtue as her supreme achievement, Cowley is not alone. Thomas Flatman sums Philips up in the last line of his Pindaric: "all that can be said of vertuous Woman was her due" (Poems, sig. f).¹¹ The best way for a man to deal with a woman competitor in poetry as in life is to deify her--and so remove her from the competition. Effectively, this is what Cowley does in the final section of "On Orinda's Poems." He places Philips in the special category of "virtuous" women. Comparing her to Boadicia--the warlike British queen who fought against, but failed to conquer, the Romans--he awards Philips the "Roman" victory in poetic arms that Boadicia coveted in battle. By deferring to yet another kind of contest, Cowley successfully evades the real question of women's place in poetry's and learning's sphere.

Cowley's funeral Pindaric takes up the same issue of Philips's poetic status, without arriving at any more satisfactory conclusion. It substitutes for the contest in arms of the first ode the famous beauty contest of the three goddesses for the apple. Here Apollo takes Paris's place as judge, presiding over a contest of literary merit and awarding Orinda the prize that Sappho and the Muses stand by and covet. Beauty is not ostensibly the issue here, but it can hardly be dismissed from the reader's mind, as Orinda wins the poetic apple, thereby becoming the "goddess of beauty" for the literary world. Cowley has also deftly confined the competition to woman against woman. Just as he had in the final sections of the previous ode when he alludes to Boadicia as the exemplar of the military "female," he allows Philips to excel in competition with other women.

Orinda on the Female coasts of Fame,
Ingrosses all the Goods of a Poetique Name.
She does no Partner with her see,
Does all the business there alone, which we
Are forc'd to carry on by a whole Company.

(3:16-20)

Any question of comparative talent or achievement or of admitting women poets into a competition with men Cowley simply bypasses. When he allows men into the competition, he couples wit with virtue. Virtue once more serves to assure Orinda the prize in this poem as in the last: "Orinda does our boasting Sex out-do, / Not in Wit only, but in Virtue too" (4:8-9). Cowley has so manipulated the terms of the contest that while seeming to award the highest poetic laurels to Philips, he has done no more than concede that she is the best of the female poets. By employing the language of courtly compliment for his address to Philips, he announces to his audience that he is engaging in the game of sexual diplomacy. The issue of Philips's status as a poet is never really entertained. Cowley confers only such supremacy in beauty and wit and virtue as men have always conferred on women whom they court poetically, reserving (tacitly) real intellectual superiority for males and male poets.

It is certainly no accident that many of the arguments that Cowley uses when he appears to compliment female wit reappear in Triumphs of Female Wit. There, however, Mr. H argues the countercase--women's inferiority in the intellectual sphere. Like Cowley, he is lavish with courtly compliment, graciously granting women supremacy in "captivating hearts." But in return for such supremacy women should be content to remain the object of wit and wisdom and must not dig and delve in "Apollo's mines." The last part of Mr. H's Pindaric takes up an issue that Cowley does not touch on, but one that both the Young Lady in "The Emulation" and Aphra Behn raise: the right of women to the education of the schools. The Young Lady protests:

But they [men] refuse to let us know
What sacred Sciences doth impart
Or the mysteriousness of Art,
In Learning's pleasing Paths deny'ed to go
From Knowledge banish'ed, and their Schools;
We seem design'd alone for useful Fools ...

(2:4-9)

She takes the view--in fact a Miltonic one--that knowledge is necessary to the confirmation of virtue and the progress of the soul. Women, after all, have souls just as worthy and noble as men. Mr. H counters her arguments fiercely, using in fact another Miltonic argument--Christ's from Paradise Regained--that knowledge does not in itself bestow virtue: "'Tis not a studeous life that brings / Knowledge of revealed things" (6:9-10). In fact, he continues, women may be seeking at their soul's peril "that full view of intellectual Light" (7:4-5). We are never far in the seventeenth century from the fatal tree of knowledge and the trespass of mother Eve against it. By seeking to gain the "Tree of Knowledge," he cautions, women will surely lose the "Tree of Life." With biting sarcasm he commends their would-be quest:

May you walk safe in Learnings milky way,
Know all that Men and Angels say,
Expand your Souls to Truth as wide as day.

(7:8-10)

But at the same time he warns the lady against ambitious pride--Eve's and Satan's sin. The learned Young Lady is firmly put in her place.

This lively debate over women's education is one in which Aphra Behn--the era's leading female poet after the death of Katherine Philips--also had a stake. In a Pindaric ode that she sent to Thomas Creech, commending the translation of Lucretius that he published in 1682, Behn raises the issue of women's exclusion from the universities. Behn's poem, however, is not per se a feminist protest. The ode is framed as a compliment to the learned Creech, a scholar at Wadham College, Oxford, and Creech published it with other commendatory poems in the reissue of his translation in 1683.¹² Whatever other issues Behn takes up, she is generous in looking first and foremost at Creech as a learned and accomplished translator of Lucretius. Both Behn's poem and the Young Lady's Pindaric appeared in the same year--the protest for women's education was something very much on the tongues of women in this decade. After Behn offers Creech the usual opening compliments on his work, she points out how his translation has brought the classical author, Lucretius, to a new set of readers--women. While she warmly thanks Creech for enlightening women such as herself, she ironically criticizes the system that has withheld classical authors from women by denying them education in Latin and Greek that would have enabled them to read him themselves.

That she chooses Pindaric ode as a verse form both for her compliments to the learned Creech and for her protest against the exclusion of women from the classics is yet another irony. For Behn could not have come to Pindar or the Pindaric ode--just as she could not have read Lucretius--on her own. To do so she needed the help of a learned man--in this case, Abraham Cowley, whom she openly acknowledges as her mentor in this mode.¹³ The form of Pindaric ode that she wrote is, of course, the Cowleian Pindaric, whose metrical irregularities differ markedly from the absolute regularities of true Pindaric ode. It is a verse form that Cowley invented to approximate Pindaric ode and that poets of the seventeenth century, who, like Behn, lacked knowledge of Greek, followed, perhaps thinking that they were writing true Pindaric odes.

Behn's ode to Creech is couched in the courtliest of language. She learned not only her Pindarics from Cowley but also the art of playing at the game of courtly compliment. She addresses Creech as Daphnis and in speaking to and of him assumes the attitude of a shepherdess to an admired shepherd. Much of Behn's own verse was pastoral and courtly. Both in her plays and in her commendatory verse, Behn often plays the game of sexual politics, adopting the language of Ovidian love combat for her address to men and poets alike. In not relinquishing that artillery of love poetry in her poem to Creech, she imitates the tactics of male writers such as Cowley and their use of a smoke screen of overblown compliments. Behn poses in her address to Creech-Daphnis the kind of courtly rivalry that we saw in Cowley's own address to Philips.

Behn is the mistress of this coy game. She knows how to use the so-called advantages of her sex. Sometimes, however, she can be perfectly straightforward--even gender blind, as she addresses a fellow playwright, such as Edward Howard, warmly encouraging him not to forsake playwriting despite the failure of his play. On the other hand, when she addresses Rochester, whom she idolizes, she is all melting female before the superior master. She can be ambiguous also, as she is in her Pindaric ode to Dr. Burnet, and use courtly language not to compliment the man but to maintain a discreet distance from him and his importuning "Pen." Dr. Burnet was trying to persuade Behn to write an ode to welcome William III to the throne. Behn, who was a Jacobite loyal to the overthrown James II, plays the courtly game to refuse Burnet's request. She does this by assuming the part of the love-struck maid resisting the wit of a persuasive seducer. So she overpraises Burnet and underpraises herself as a poor weak female, thus neatly sidestepping Burnet's request and exposing his less than honorable purpose. This is exactly what we would expect from the author of The Rover and the love songs to Lysander, a lover whose insincerity and faithlessness she exposes in her own courtly fashion.

Thus, when we look at Behn's fulsome compliments in the Creech poem to the learned Daphnis, we may be just a little suspicious of her ultimate design. Is she criticizing the learned world of Oxford University that excludes women from its portals even as she appears to compliment one of its shining lights? First of all, I do not doubt Behn's basic admiration for Creech and his translation of Lucretius. Her Pindaric goes beyond the easy courtly compliment: throughout she commends Creech's achievements in Englishing Lucretius in a correct and effective manner. However much she may flatter Creech in his persona as the young Daphnis, she pays him the ultimate tribute of dealing with his scholarship first, his pleasing person second. Although we need not suspect the sincerity of her praise, we cannot ignore gender considerations. Can a woman poet set aside the attitudes of the male establishment toward women when she addresses a man on the subject that necessarily involves the male exclusion of women? On the surface Behn deftly plays the part of a woman content to sit at Creech's feet and bask in the afterglow of his brilliance, accepting, as men like Mr. H in his rejoinder to the Young Lady advised, to humbly sup at the table of man's knowledge. "Thou great Young Man!" she begins,

Permit amongst the Crowd
Of those that sing thy mighty Praises lowd,
My humble Muse to bring its Tribute too.

(ll. 1-3)¹⁴

In an almost coquettish way she apologizes for her "Womannish Tenderness" (l. 14); she had intended to write a strong manly verse, but she is overcome by her emotion. Daphnis kindles a fire in admiring souls. Shepherds and nymphs alike "strow Garlands" at Daphnis's feet, for he conquers, not only in the art of verse but also in the arts of love.

Advance young Daphnis then, and mayst thou prove
Still Sacred in thy Poetry and Love.
May all the Groves with Daphnis Songs be blest,
Whilst every Bark is with thy Distichs drest.
May Timerous Maids learn how to Love from thence
And the Glad Shepherd Arts of Eloquence.

(ll. 127-32)

Is it the man or the translator that Behn is praising as she crosses the boundary from the language of compliment to the language of courtship?

Amid her hyperbolic praise of Creech and his translations, Behn includes some comments on classical learning that can hardly reflect favorably on Creech and his Oxford peers. While in context her comments appear laudatory, she adds a personal history that tells us something different.

Let them admire thee on--Whilst I this newer way
Pay thee yet more than they:
For more I owe, since thou hast taught me more,
Then all the mighty Bards that went before.
Others long since have Pal'd the vast delight;
In duller Greek and Latin satisfy'd the Appetite:
But I unlearn'd in Schools, disdain that mine
Should treated be at any Feast but thine.

(ll. 17-24)

This looks on the surface like a straightforward thank-you from someone ignorant of classical tongues to the translator who has provided her with access to a text in Latin that she could not have read before. But Behn does not stop here. Instead she goes on to criticize a nation and an educational system that denies knowledge to those like her solely on the basis of sex.¹⁵

Till now, I curst my Birth, my Education,
And more the scanted Customes of the Nation:
Permitting not the Female Sex to tread,
The Mighty Paths of Learned Heroes dead.
The God-like Vergil, and great Homers Verse,
Like Divine Mysteries are conceal'd from us.
We are forbid all grateful Theams,
No ravishing thoughts approach our Ear,
The Fulsom Gingle of the times,
Is all we are allow'd to understand or hear.

(ll. 25-34)

Behn is too clever a writer, however, to allow this digressive passage to become the prelude to a peroration on the male-dominated educational system. No, instead she passes on to more praise of the translator who has so benefited the "ignorant" sex. Yet if we read the parable that follows ironically--as, I believe, Behn intended it to be read--we see that she has not at all changed her tune, only her tactics.

In olden times, she begins, the poet was the means by which knowledge of the gods and their laws was brought to men. He not only educated but also civilized men, bringing them from the savage woods to social order.¹⁶ Now, proposes Behn slyly, the poet-translator has conferred a similar benefit on women, not only alleviating their ignorance and civilizing them but granting them "equality" with men as well.

So thou by this Translation dost advance
Our Knowledg from the State of Ignorance,
And equals us to man.

(ll. 41-43)

With her gracious compliment to the divine powers of poet-translator, Behn ironically enlists Creech in the cause of female rights, making him the benefactor of women and the one who will bring them closer to equality with men. Yet not for a moment has she quit her stance as earnest admirer: "Ah how can we, / Enough Adore, or Sacrifice enough to thee!" (ll. 43-44). Reassuming the posture of adoring female before wise instructor male, she lauds Creech for making all this terribly difficult philosophy comprehensible to the inferior sex, decking, as she says, the "Mystick terms of Rough Philosophy" in "so soft and gay a Dress" that "they at once Instruct and Charm the Sense" (ll. 45-49). Behn has learned a tactic from Milton's Eve on how to soothe the ego of an Adamic don explaining "angelic texts." Why, she seems to say, he has explained everything so clearly that even a woman can understand it.

Behn's poem to Creech was read by her time as gracious praise, not as a female's protest. J. W. in a Pindaric on Behn summed it up: "Well has she sung the learned Daphnis praise, / And crown'd his Temples with immortal Bays."¹⁷ By imbedding her protest for women's rights in a poem that the male establishment would read as praise of one of their own, Behn has played a rather subtle double game. The Young Lady of "The Emulation" could be dismissed by a gentlemanly wit like Mr. H as merely hysterical and shrill--and her poem forgotten. Behn's more subtle attack could not so easily be shrugged off.

Behn did not, however, escape the fate of Katherine Philips or that of other women poets of her era, as being cited as a "female" poet, rather than as a poet. As the commendatory verses to the 1684 and 1697 editions of her verse attest, she received the same shallow compliments, being dismissed merely as the "wonder of [her] Sex." Often compared, as Philips had been, to the Muses, to Sappho, and even to Orinda, her female predecessor, she could reach no further than combining the "Beauties of both Sexes"--a female sweetness with a manly grace.¹⁸ Cowley had said a similar thing about Philips (assuming that masculinity is a necessary juncture to femininity to produce poetry). She is lauded, also, as Philips was, in masculine Pindaric strains. But she does not rise so high as to be, as Cowley had been called, Pindar's equal. She is permitted to dwell, however, in the company of Virgil's Shade and Ovid's Ghost and with Cowley, the first of England's poets.¹⁹ Having no Latin and no Greek, Behn rose as high as a woman might in her age--to be included in a literary Elysium as a companion to Pindar's translator, Cowley.

Notes

¹I am grateful to Warren Cherniak for his illuminating discussions on Aphra Behn and her place in the Restoration. See his book: Sexual Freedom in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). My thanks also to Achsah Guibbory and Robert Hinman, who read an early version of this paper and offered helpful commentary. Triumphs of Female Wit, In Some Pindarick Odes, or The Emulation. Together with an Answer to an OBJECTOR against Female Ingenuity, and Capacity of Learning. Also, A Preface to the Masculine Sex, by a Young Lady (London: T. Malthus, 1683). I am indebted to Warren Cherniak for pointing out this collection to me.

²Robert Hinman describes Cowley's pindarics on Philips as unqualified praise: "his lofty eulogy of the matchless Orinda's verse celebrates the emergence of woman as man's intellectual peer, and his elegy for her includes his view (also held by Milton) of the necessary relationship between successful poetry and virtue." See Abraham Cowley's World of Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 83-84.

³For a description of the circumstances of Philips's visit, see Philip Webster Souers, The Matchless Orinda (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 242. See "An ode upon retirement, made upon occasion of Mr. Cowley's on that subject," The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda, ed. Patrick Thomas (Stump Cross, Eng.: Stump Cross Books, 1990), 1:193-95.

⁴Jean Loiseau, Abraham Cowley: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Henri Didier, 1931), 166.

⁵A facsimile of Philips's 1667 volume is now available. See Poems (1667) (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1992).

⁶"Anacreontiques," in Miscellanies, The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (London, 1668), 33.

⁷Verses written on several occasions," Works, 2-4.

⁸The Way of the World in The Complete Works of William Congreve, ed. Montague Summers (Soho: The Nonesuch Press, 1922), 3:18.

⁹Congreve, "Notes to Ovid's Art of Love," Works, 4:130.

¹⁰Also see the Earl of Orrery's poem to Philips that links poetry and love:

In me it does not the least trouble breed,
That your fair Sex does Ours in Verse exceed,
Since every Poet this great Truth does prove,
Nothing so much inspires a Muse as Love.

(Poems [London, 1667], sig. b)

¹¹The Earl of Roscommon links Philips's supremacy in virtue to her supremacy in a virtuous game of love:

Vertue (dear Friend) needs no defence,
No arms, but its own innocence;
Quivers and Bows, and poison'd darts,
Are only us'd by guilty hearts.

(sig. b2)

James Tyrell links virtue and wit:

Whether her Vertue, or her Wit
We chuse for our eternal Theme,
What hand can draw the perfect Scheme?

(sig. e)

When Milton published Paradise Lost in 1667, how many admirers linked his wit to his virtue and his beauty?

¹²"To the Unknown DAPHNIS in his Excellent Translation of Lucretius," in T. Lucretius Carus, The Epicurean Philosopher, His Six books. De Natura Rerum, Done into English VERSE with NOTES. The Second Edition, Corrected and Enlarged. (Oxford: L. Lichfield, 1683). Behn's poem is signed and dated London, January 25, 1682. Behn published her own version of the ode in 1684; it was reprinted after her death in the 1697 edition: Mrs. A. Behn, Poems upon Several Occasions; with a Voyage to the Island of Love (London, 1697). Also see The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (London: William Pickering, 1992). Todd cites a different version of the Creech ode.

¹³In her pindaric to Dr. Burnet, Behn notes that she is following Cowley in the Pindaric mode, but has never ventured as high as he in the mode. A PINDARIC POEM to the Reverend Doctor Burnet, on the Honour he did me of Enquiring after me and my MUSE by A. Behn (London: R. Bentley, 1689).

¹⁴I quote from A. Behn, "To Mr. Creech," Poems upon Several Occasions: With a Voyage to the Island of Love (London, 1684), 50-57.

¹⁵Behn was fluent in French, if not in Greek and Latin, and two French translations of Pindar from the early seventeenth century would have been available to her, one by Marin in prose published in Paris in 1617, another in prose and verse by Sieur de Lagausie, published in Paris in 1626. On Behn's lack of Latin see Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, a Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York: Dial Press, 1980). Although Behn published paraphrases of Ovid and a translation of Cowley's Plantarum, she made a point of saying that she did not know Latin. In his preface to Ovid, Dryden compliments Behn on the facility of her translation (despite her lack of direct knowledge of the original), but in his "A Satyr on the Modern Translator," he rebukes her and others for attempting to translate a language they do not know (54).

¹⁶The ode to Creech is interesting not only as an example of commendatory poetry with a subversive aim, but also on its own merits as an example of late seventeenth-century Pindaric verse. Particularly impressive here is Behn's use of Pindaric techniques: her adaptation of the Pindaric myth and her extension of the Pindaric encomium to Creech to other figures connected with Wadham--notably Sprat, and her mentors Rochester and Cowley. The ode sets its criticism of women's exclusion from the classics in a poem that demonstrates an accomplished classical Pindaric technique.

¹⁷"Upon these and other Excellent Works of the Incomparable Astyraea" in Aphra Behn, Poems upon Several Occasions (London, 1697), 3.

¹⁸See especially "To the Lovely witty Astraea, on her Excellent Poems," "To the excellent Madam Behn, on her Poems," "To ASTRAEA, on her Poems," in Behn, Poems (London, 1684). Even in "The Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Behn," attached to a reprint of The Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (London, 1696), written purportedly by "a Gentlewoman of her Acquaintance," Beauty is not divorced from Wit and Intellect. The Gentlewoman remarks that Behn was "Mistress of uncommon Charms of Body, as well as Mind ... Wit, Beauty, and Judgment, seldom met in one, especially in Woman, (you may allow this from a Woman) but in her they were Eminent" (n.p.).

¹⁹F.N.W. "To Madam A Behn on the publication of her Poems" (8:13-15) in Behn, Poems (1684).

Source: Stella P. Revard, "Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and the Female Pindaric." In Representing Women in Renaissance England, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, pp. 227-41. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.