Katherine Philips was a seventeenth century poet, that wrote in the Commonwealth and Restoration Period. She was the first women to tackle a platonic friendship, a secular topic during her time, between the same sex (Tate, vii). During this time, friendships were not common between the same sex because it was a common perception that women were not intelligent enough to communicate, let alone be friends, with one another without there being romantic feelings involved (Tate,36). Philips wrote poetry to her friends but because it was written in a romantic way, it led some people in society to think that her poems were written to express her homosexual feelings. However, according to Mimi Goodall in “Friendship in Emblem: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in the Poetry of Katherine Philips” this argument is proven to be invalid because through her poems and praises Philips is described as a pure and virtuous woman.
Rebecca Tate in “Katherine Philips, a Critical Edition of the Poetry” explains Philips view on friendship as an idealized one. She believed that the love held between two friends was not based on physical but rather intellectual attraction. It was focused on a person’s goodness, virtue, and intellect.
