Secularism and its Discontents: Forms of Freethought in Mathilde Blind's Periodical Poetry.

The poet and woman of letters Mathilde Blind (1841–1896) achieved her early fame — and notoriety — as a radical freethinker, especially as a translator and champion of David Friedrich Strauss's The Old Faith and the New: A Confession (1873), which articulates an antitheist form of historical and scientific materialism. Her subsequent prose works — essays, reviews, and translations — confirm this reputation. But her verse, which makes use of what Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Revolt of Islam called "a subtler language within language," speaks in a subjective, non-polemical voice. Focusing on the poetry Blind published in a range of Victorian periodicals, including Dark Blue , the Athenaeum, Black and White , and The Savoy , this essay argues that these poems express the tension between materialism and idealism that characterize her poetry as a whole, while also illuminating the complex dynamics of secularism in the Romantic and post-Romantic eras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]