HEMANS, Felicity Dorothea.

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Poems. First edition of this precocious start to Hemans's successful career, collecting poems written between the ages of 8 and 13. Published by the Liverpool firm that also issued the works of the politician William Roscoe, whom Hemans first encountered in 1807, the volume helped establish the reputation that later brought her to the attention of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom she corresponded until her mother intervened.The collection was published under Hemans's maiden name, Browne, as she was only 14 at the time of publication, and contains a list of 978 subscribers, including the future George IV as the Prince of Wales, and the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). Its success opened the way for the many publications that followed during her lifetime, including the poems beginning "The boy stood on the burning deck" and "The stately homes of England", both of which have become canonical."Hemans's influence is traceable in nineteenth-century verse, especially in new forms of dramatic lyric in the Brownings, Tennyson, and Kipling in Britain; Sigourney, Longfellow, Whittier, and Harper in America; and Droste-Hülshoff in Germany. Even Wordsworth's 'Extempore Effusion' reflects Hemans" (ODNB).

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