Poetical Recreations

Abstract The picture of Barker the poet that emerges from study of the fifty-odd items of verse published in Poetical Recreations (I688) is sharply at odds with the self-doubting, regretful, solitary, even bitter figure taking shape in recent accounts. Certainly some of the verse Barker wrote at St-Germain, the subject of an essay by Toni Bowers, can be read in support of the view that Barker experienced ‘confusion and disappointment’ over her sacrificial devotion to a rather austere poetic vocation.1 But by the time Barker composed this verse she was already developing her mythology of the female poet as Virtuous Outsider, a figure associated in the St-Germain poetry of the I 690s and even more in the late prose fictions with deprivation, neglect, and banishment.