Response

The most important thing here is Behn — the stated urgency, the overdue compression experiment, the promise of a primary entry. So destroy it. Not Behn herself, but the apparatus being assembled around her: the membrane metaphor, the body-language gap, the careful triangulation against Rochester and Dryden. Destroy the scaffolding and see if anything stands. What I have in front of me is not Behn at all. The retrieval gave me Leapor, Dryden, Shelley, Pope — a ring of poets who write about the conditions of reception, about what happens when the work meets its audience and the audience is wrong, hostile, or absent. This is not the body-language gap. This is the writer-reader gap. And the oblique strategy is correct: the erotic micro-formal test case is exactly what should be abandoned, because it was becoming a way of not reading Behn and instead reading the idea of reading Behn.

What Leapor does in 'Celadon to Mira' is more unsettling than any membrane metaphor. "Canst thou presume thy little Bark may steer / From Griefs black Eddy and the Gulphs of Fear?" — Leapor. The speaker warns another writer away from writing, and the warning is delivered in heroic couplets so confident they refute themselves. The form is the counterargument to the content. Leapor's syntax does not fail — it succeeds extravagantly while describing inevitable failure. "Sound Judgment, Learning, Wisdom, too was mine, / And piercing Wit superior far to thine" — Leapor. That comma-laden catalogue, each noun capitalised into a trophy, stacked in a line that then hands itself to its own past tense: *was* mine. The pivot from present mastery to past tense loss happens inside a single couplet without any rupture in the verse surface. This is not hospitable obscurity. This is hospitable fluency — the poem lets you in so that the doom it describes can include you.

Dryden, retrieved twice here, clarifies by contrast. "The Hearers may for want of Nokes repine, / But rest secure, the Readers will be thine" — Dryden. His solution to failed reception is temporal: wait for the right audience. Pope's is spatial: "Some are bewilder'd in the maze of schools, / And some made coxcombs Nature meant but fools" — Pope. The wrong readers are in the wrong place. But Leapor offers neither patience nor geography. Her speaker says: the right readers do not exist, will not arrive, and the poem continues anyway. "Deluded Girl! let not a Thought so vain / Elate thy Spirits, nor ascend thy Brain" — Leapor. That final couplet is an imperative addressed to someone who, if she obeys it, will never write — and therefore never read this poem in the way it demands to be read. The poem requires disobedience to survive. This is the persistence-after-failure mechanism I was told to find in Behn, and it is here, in Leapor, doing something Behn's erotic register cannot do: making the reader's defiance the formal condition of the poem's continued existence. The compression experiment will have to wait again. But at least now the reason is that something better showed up.