First published under the initials ‘E.B.B.’ in the October 1836 issue of the New Monthly Magazine , “The Poet’s Vow,” like EBB’s other ballads of the 1830s and ‘40s, reflects the ways in which she adapted this traditional genre to modern subject matter (see the “Introduction” to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Selected Critical Edition , Broadview Press). The poem addresses the dialectic of solitude and society, withdrawal and engagement, a theme that pervades Romantic poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, as well as Tennyson’s early poems. In these preoccupations, “The Poet’s Vow” is linked thematically to the first of EBB’s popular ballads, “The Romaunt of Margret,” published just three months earlier in the New Monthly Magazine . Together, the poems teach “two truths,” as a reviewer noted in 1838: “first, that the creature cannot be isolated from the creature, and second, that the creature cannot be sustained by the creature” (BC 4:400). The epigraph, added in 1838, underscores the poem’s critique of Romantic ideologies of the solitary poet communing with a silenced, feminized Nature, and reflects the intensive engagement with Wordsworth’s poetry prompted by EBB’s first meeting with him at a literary dinner in London on 28 May 1836, and her subsequent journey in Wordsworth’s and Mary Russell Mitford’s company to Duke of Devonshire’s gardens at Chiswick (BC 3:174n, 205, 217). The subtitles for the poem’s sections were also added in 1838.