SOURCE: "Excusing the Breach of Nature's Laws: The Discourse of Denial and Disguise in Katherine Philips' Friendship Poetry," in Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 1–14.

In the following essay, Easton associates Philips's strategies of political disguise and sexual repression with her exploration of poetic language.

In his preface to the first authorized edition of Katherine Philips' Poems, her editor and confidant, Charles Cotter ell, praises the poems that follow by attempting to situate them beyond gender, beyond history, beyond language, beyond geography, and beyond mortal existence:

Some of them would be no disgrace to the name of any man that amongst us is most esteemed for his excellency in this kind, and there are none that may not pass with favour, when it is remembred that they fell hastily from the pen but of a Woman. We might well have call'd her the English...