Anne Killigrew

"The Early Modern Englishwoman" series makes available a comprehensive and focused collection of writings in English from 1500 to 1750. This volume focuses on the few extant poems of Anne Killigrew, who remains a largely unknown yet competent English poetess.

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During Anne Killigrew's lifetime (1660-1685) most of her known living relatives were connected to the court, yet very little is known about Anne herself. The twenty-five complete poems and five fragments that were collected and published by her father soon after her death probably represent only a portion of her output. They are reproduced here from the copy held in the Folger Shakespeare Library. These works suggest a poet quite conversant with the period's propensity to comment and compliment in verse. They suggest a sometimes conventional, sometimes merely competent, but often quite promising writer. Moreover, unlike many of her contemporaries, Killigrew never uses Latin, or French, or Italian in her verse. From the evidence of the poems here there is good reason to think that Killigrew would have been a fine eighteenth-century poet.