"And the air vibrates with the silver sound". Anna Barbauld's Poetry

This book provides a contribution to the critical revaluation of Anna Barbauld's poetry. In particular, its purpose is to analyse the language of Barbauld's poems, namely, their style, their lexical choices and their rhetorical structure. Whereas the first stage of the book is a consideration of Barbauld's rhetoric as applied to her political poetry, the second and longer phase is a stylistic study of the poetry of domestic, scientific, religious and aesthetic subject. Finally, this study demonstrates that Barbauld's verse offers conciliation between the sphere of concrete domesticity, intended both as familial sociability and, latu sensu, the obedience to the values of political and social cohabitation, and the private realm of dreaminess, where the poet retires to meditate, to escape from mundane ordinariness, and to find expression for the diversions of her fancy.