Felicia Hemans
born Sept. 25, 1793, Liverpool
died May 16, 1835, Dublin
English poet who owed the immense popularity of
her poems to a talent for treating Romantic
themes—nature, the picturesque, childhood
innocence, travels abroad, liberty, the
heroic—with an easy and engaging fluency. Poems
(1808), written when she was between 8 and 13,
was the first of a series of 24 volumes of
verse; from 1816 to 1834 one or more appeared
almost every year.
At 19 she married Capt. Alfred Hemans, but they
separated seven years later; her prolific output
helped to support her five children. She became
a literary celebrity, admired by such famous
older writers as William Wordsworth and Sir
Walter Scott. Often diffuse and sentimental, she
has been chiefly remembered for her shorter
pieces, notably “The Landing of the Pilgrim
Fathers,” “Dirge,” “Casabianca” (“The boy stood
on the burning deck”), and The Homes of England
(“The stately homes of England”), but was
perhaps at her best in her sequence of poems on
female experience, Records of Women (1828).
