SOURCE: "Manly Sweetness: Katherine Philips among the Neoclassicals," in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 3, Summer, 1993, pp. 259–79.

In the following excerpt, Loscocco discusses "the decline in Philips's reputation in the eighteenth century," which she explains by "charting the interplay between changes in the reception of her poetry and changes … in neoclassical literary aesthetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."

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." Few at the time dissented from Cowley's assessment, and many—some of them prominent writers—agreed. 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."

No one...