Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. III. The Eighteenth Century: Addison to Blake
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (16611720)Critical Introduction by Edmund W. Gosse
[Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea was born at Sidmonton, Hants, the residence of her father, Sir William Kingsmill. She married Heneage Finch, fourth Earl of Winchilsea, who survived her six years. She died on the 5th of August, 1720, leaving no issue. Her works consist of The Spleen, a pindaric ode, 1701; The Prodigy, 1706; Miscellany Poems, 1713; and Aristomenes, a tragedy.]
Lady Winchilsea was one of the last pindaric writers of the school of Cowley. Her odes display that species of writing in the final dissolution out of which it was redeemed by Gray and Collins. Such a poem as her All is Vanity, full as it is of ingenious thought, and studded with noble and harmonious lines, fails to impress the attention as a vertebrate composition. Her Ode to the Spleen, from which Pope borrowed his famous ‘aromatic pain,’ is still more loose and fragmentary in structure. On the other hand, her less ambitious studies have a singular perfection of form and picturesqueness of manner. She lights upon the right epithet and employs it with precision, and gives a brilliant turn, even to a triviality, by some bright and natural touch. Her Nocturnal Reverie is worthy of Wordsworth’s commendation; it is simply phenomenal as the creation of a friend of Prior and of Pope, and some of the couplets, especially those which describe the straying horse, and the cries of the birds, are worthy of the closest observers of nature in a naturalistic age. In light verse Lady Winchilsea took Prior as a model, and succeeded respectably; her reply to Pope’s complimentary verses to her under the name of Ardelia deserves higher praise.
From her age to this Lady Winchilsea has received nothing but neglect from the English public. Her contemporaries disregarded her writings, as she herself complains, and in 1753 there were still existing two collections of her poems in MS., which no one had taken the trouble to print. To the public of the eighteenth century her delicate observation of nature seemed less important than the didactic lyricism of Mrs. Barber or the frivolity of Lætitia Pilkington. If those unpublished poems, to which reference has been made, are still in the possession of her family, it is highly desirable that they should be given to the world.