Lucretia Davidson in Europe: Female Elegy, Literary Transmission and the Figure of the Romantic Poetess
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay heeds Yopie Prins’s recent call to abandon critical attempts to recover the subjectivity of (real) poetesses and instead to look at the culturally constructed figure of the “poetess.” It describes the early reception history of American poetess Lucretia Davidson who died at 16, (possibly of anorexia nervosa). Focused as it was on her death, this transatlantic body of criticism (Southey, Poe) and tribute (Desbordes-Valmore, Karolina Pavlova) offers to the poetess tradition a women’s ethic of self-sacrifice enabling a female form of literary transmission that celebrates women’s interchangeability rather than their uniqueness. An elegy by French poetess Marceline Desbordes-Valmore manipulates Davidson’s image as a means of insisting on the abstemiousness (to the point of death) of the poetess figure despite her hyperproductivity, and then ultimately insists upon the interchangeability and solidarity of women poets. In contrast, Karolina Pavlova’s elegy to Davidson carves out of this transmissible figure her own particular identity, leading to the masculinization of Pavlova’s poetry by Russian critics – and, unfortunately, to Pavlova’s subsequent obscurity. This essay leaves open the question as to which of these two elegists made the “better” choice, delineating instead options for transcontinental women poets in shaping their own subsequent transmission.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".