Charlotte Mew - Böcker

The British poet Charlotte Mew - whose 150th anniversary falls in 2019 - was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by fellow writers. She has since been neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again. This Selected Poetry and Prose is edited by Faber poet Julia Copus, who recently unveiled a blue plaque on Mew's childhood house in Doughty Street and is writing her biography. Mew was a curious mix of New Woman and stalwart Victorian. Her poems speak to us strongly today, in these strangely mixed times of exposure and seclusion: they reveal the private agony of an isolated being who was forced to keep secret the tragedies of her personal life while being at the same time propelled by her work into the public arena. Her poetry transfigures that very private suffering into art that has a universal resonance.

The Rambling Sailor collects Mew’s final, most powerful verse, in which love, nature and religion all intermingle to paint pictures of pain, hope and a deep love of the natural world through the writer’s knowledgeable eyes.

'The great unshackling of women's voices in poetry has one of its beginnings right here. These sad beautiful poems are full of rendings and breakings and burnings.' So writes Eavan Boland in her introduction to her selection of poems of Charlotte Mew (1868-1928). Identifying in Mew the startling, powerful voice that first made possible a new kind of poetry, free of Victorian expectations of a 'poetess', Boland has selected the poems that have meant most to her as a reader and a writer. The dialogue between the two poets establishes Mew's place in the continuing dialogue of women's writing.