Invocation, Evocation, Vocation: Communication with the Dead and Poetic Investiture in Felicia Hemans’s “A Spirit’s Return”

Felicia Hemans’s “A Spirit’s Return” (1830) is one of the most triumphant—though largely overlooked—representations of communication with the dead in Romantic poetry. The article offers a new reading of the poem by uncovering the correspondence between lyric invocation, necromantic evocation, and poetic vocation that underpins it. Showing how Hemans relies on this correspondence to make a uniquely bold statement of visionary poetics, it illuminates the ways in which she thereby reimagines not only the figure of the male Romantic poet-prophet but also that of the poetess which played such a central role in her poetic career and reception.