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Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: translating the language of intimacy.

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From: Victorian Poetry
Date: 20061222
Author:Marshall, Gail

The poet who famously bemoaned her lack of literary grandmothers was not lacking in gratefully acknowledged male forebears, particularly Shakespeare and Homer, whom she describes as the "colossal borderers of the two intellectual departments of the world's age ... the antique and modern literatures." (1) But her relationship with those figures, as she acknowledges through Aurora Leigh's encounters with earlier poets, has to be carefully managed, the possibility of her dependent and derivative status scrupulously recognized:

 
   My own best poets, am I one with you, 
   That ...

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