Writing as Truth-Seeking According To Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Essay on Mind (1826)

Abstract

Whether devoted to family members (To My Father on His Birth-Day, Verses to My Brother), poets (Pope, Byron), or patriots and national heroes (Rigas Feraios, Rafael del Riego y Núñez), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s occasional verses, companion poems, elegies and philosophical reflections in her earliest published collection, An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826), represent a versatile dialogue with past which she perused consistently to claim a voice and identity of her own. She conceptualized time, suggesting that the emergence of selfhood lay across a journey “to the grave” (viz. supplementary analysis of Book I, An Essay…). In this paper, I aim at revealing the ontological range of writing according to An Essay on Mind. From a hermeneutic standpoint, I defend the writer’s faith in experiential knowledge as foundation for the creative process while I also explore her interest in learning as duty and in poetry as truth-seeking and truth-telling.