The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe

Mary Tighe's work is every bit as important as the editors argue. This complete collection of poetry, as well as the supplementary writings contained within, is a great boon to the scholarship of the period. -- Jerome McGann, University of Virginia This anthology is not just a gift to scholars of Mary Tighe, a group whose numbers will no doubt swell as a result of Paula Feldman and Brian Cooney's groundbreaking work. It is also a gift to any reader who cares about the history of poetry, the history of women, the history of Ireland, or the literature of the Romantic period. The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe, from its authoritative introduction, its raft of previously unpublished poems, and its careful editing and copious annotations, is a massive contribution exquisitely presented. Mary Tighe's technically stunning verse has long deserved careful editorial treatment. -- Devoney Looser, Arizona State University

Meticulously edited, this volume builds on recent pioneering scholarship to restore and burnish Tighe's reputation as a major Romantic-era poet.Mary Blachford Tighe (1772-1810) was a crucial force in shaping British Romanticism. Her influential six-canto epic, Psyche, or the Legend of Love (1805), along with her shorter poems, engaged the central issues of the period, often in advance of writers now considered canonical. With remarkable vitality and virtuosity, Tighe wrote about the tensions between love and loss, duty and desire, the spiritual and the sensuous, nation and family, and the Irish and the British, all while struggling with the debilitating illness that eventually claimed her life. This scholarly edition collects for the first time dozens of recently discovered poems, accompanied by Tighe's own illustrations, and identifies eight false attributions. A historical and biographical introduction from editors Paula R. Feldman and Brian C. Cooney discusses Tighe's work within a larger social and political context, placing renewed emphasis on the conflicts she experienced as a Methodist with Anglo-Irish roots. Editorial annotations shed new light on Tighe's life, revealing for the first time, for example, that her songs were performed during her lifetime on the Dublin stage. Meticulously edited, this volume builds on recent pioneering scholarship to restore and burnish Tighe's reputation as a major Romantic-era poet.