SOURCE: DuPriest, Travis. Introduction to Poems: 1667, by Katherine Philips, pp. 3-25. Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimilies & Reprints, 1992.

In the following essay, DuPriest provides an overview of Philips's career and life, probing the issue of her lack of posthumous popularity.

With the emergence of feminist criticism has come the reconstruction of history; and with this reconstruction, the awareness that many women writers and thinkers have been forgotten in a largely male canon—some purposefully suppressed; others, consistently allowed, perhaps encouraged, to drop out of the sweep of recorded history and out of the anthologies of intellectual and literary ideas.¹ Opponents of feminist criticism in literature, history, and religion, often point out that important women have held high places in society and have been honored by their peers—Sappho, Queen Elizabeth, Julian of Norwich, Hilda of Whitby and the like. But these same critics point less enthusiastically to bright women...