SOURCE: Loscocco, Paula. “Manly Sweetness: Katherine Philips among the Neoclassicals.” Huntington Library Quarterly 56, no. 3 (summer 1993): 259-79.

In the following essay, Loscocco links the decline in popularity of Philip's poetry with changes in gender viewpoints and neoclassicism.

When Katherine Philips's posthumous Poems appeared in 1667, the volume included prefatory verses by Abraham Cowley celebrating her as England's esteemed “Woman Laureat.”¹ Few at the time dissented from Cowley's assessment, and many—some of them prominent writers—agreed.² By now, however, as critic Harriette Andreadis remarked in 1989, the “acclaim of [Philips's] contemporaries has … worn very thin”: at best she has a poem or two in anthologies, representing a minor link between metaphysical and neoclassical poetry; at worst, critics disparage her work as “florid,” “cajoling,” or overly “fluent.”³

No one has yet adequately accounted for the decline in Philips's literary fortunes.⁴ When did this decline occur? What was the nature of her original...