Poems

Her first known poem was written at the age of six or eight. The manuscript is currently in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the exact date is controversial because the "2" in the date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out. By the age of twelve she had written an "epic" poem consisting of four books of rhyming couplets. When she was 14, her father paid for the publication of a long Homeric poem entitled //The Battle of Marathon//. Barrett later referred to this as "Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone." By the age of twenty, she had read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante 's Inferno in their original languages. She learnt Hebrew and read the Old Testament from beginning to end. //Essays of the mind// was published in 1826, also at her father’s expense.