Anna Letitia Barbauld's Insect Poetics

Abstract

This article reads Anna Letitia Barbauld's affective encounter in ‘The Caterpillar’ (1825) in the light of her broader entomological writing for both adults and children. It investigates the recommendations for attention to the small and the particular in her didactic work alongside the narratives of insect subjectivity and insect metamorphosis in her occasional and lyric verse to assess the poet's contribution to an ecological mode of writing in this period. This uncovers a key tension in Barbauld's communication of insect worlds, reflected in the conclusion of ‘The Caterpillar’, where the affective encounter exposes the inescapable otherness of the human observer.