Female Victorian poets: beauty in constraint

After all, poetic composition is the art of finding beauty in constraint, of turning limitation into aesthetic opportunity, and that, we know, is a feat these women were forced to perform incessantly. As Dickinson, with her great talent for ambivalence, put it:

Essential Oils — are wrung –
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns — alone —

It is the gift of Screws —

Judith Shulevitz suggests that female Victorian poets made „ingenious use of their restrictions.“ (The New York Times.*) 22.9.02