In some ways, Letitia Landon’s Medallion Wafer poems prefigure questions with which she would engage for the span of her career. Landon’s relationship with the Gazette and the textual contexts it provided inspired Landon’s modes of engagement with art and aesthetics, but it also enabled her self-making and self-promotion as a commercial poet, and I would argue that one of the key projects of the Medallion Wafer poems is to begin to negotiate the intersections of and conflicts between those two aspects of her status as (to use Riess’s term) a post-Romantic poet.

Far from restricting Landon to commodity production for consumption, the relationship between the Gazette and its readers inspired her approach to developing similar relationships, which would remain important throughout her career and complicate her own status as a commodity. With the serialization of these early poems, Landon established a persona she would continue to cultivate and refine over the next fifteen years. Although it was an economically wise decision to publish serially, for the Gazette and, by extension, for Landon herself, it also represented an effort to engage with an audience by shaping a consistent poetic persona through which Landon‘s audience could experience an ongoing relationship rather than discreet moments of aesthetic consumption.

The Medallion Wafer poems cohered across issues by more than their tone and titles, though. Their deliberate selection as a set is evident in their common concerns; in these poems, the aesthetic is a contact zone between preservation and loss, mediating between the desire for the former and the experience of the latter.

By their duality, the Medallion Wafer poems encourage the kind of engagement Landon and the Gazette sought from readers. This engagement is marked by more than consumption; rather, it is a performance of the functions of both consumers and patrons. Landon trains her audience, through these poems, to interpret aesthetic objects and to consider the roles those objects play in the readers’ own experience of love.

It is by reading through the frame of aesthetic engagement that we can understand the Medallion Wafer poems as investigating and interpreting art‘s affective functions. In “Hercules and Iole,” Landon imbues the love scene with tensions derived from the certainty of loss, so that art becomes a space for the preservation of pleasure, but it also denies fulfillment and its preservative function is overshadowed by the historical narrative in which it is embedded.

“Head of Ariadne,” likewise, considers the destructive force of historical narrative but does so in a specifically gendered way. Engagement with the aesthetic for women, the poem suggests, is always engagement with the same narrative of love and disappointment. The poem, read alongside “Conclusion,” creates an ambiguity around women’s possibilities, creating a space in which a female artist may be able to engage with art on terms other than those of the narrative which has usually circumscribed her gender.

These interpretations seem to belie the implications of the heading to the Medallion Wafer poems; they do more than “preserve…the most beautiful forms of antiquity” and act as “seals to lovers’ correspondence.” In fact, the more we consider the ambiguities of the poems and the doubt they cast on such simple readings of consumer goods, the more it becomes apparent that Landon reads these objects as somehow ironic in their claim to preserve and protect. Rather than interpret wafer seals as strictly ineffective, though, she imbues them with the ambiguity and complexity of human desire and experience, between the ideal and reality. In this way, Landon constructed the Medallion Wafer poems using the specific relationships between the Gazette and its readers as a framework to interrogate the relationships between individuals and art objects and the functions of those objects beyond consumption. It is not so much a rejection of transcendence as an investigation of the desire for it and the projection of that desire onto commercial-aesthetic objects which embody both imaginative fantasy and the commercial fulfillment of desire.