American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century

by Cheryl Walker (Editor)

This publication marks the first time in a hundred years that a wide range of nineteenth-century American women's poetry has been accessible to the general public in a single volume. Included are the humorous parodies of Phoebe Cary and Mary Weston Fordham and the stirring abolitionist poems of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Maria Lowell, and Rose Terry Cooke. Included, too, are haunting reflections on madness, drug use, and suicide of women whose lives, as Cheryl Walker explains, were often as melodramatic as the poems they composed and published. In addition to works by more than two dozen poets, the anthology includes ample headnotes about each author's life and a brief critical evaluation of her work. Walker's introduction to the volume provides valuable contextual material to help readers understand the cultural background, economic necessities, literary conventions, and personal dynamics that governed women's poetic production in the nineteenth century.

480 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1992

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore this anthology, partly because it shuns Emily Dickinson in favor of the female poets she overshadowed and partly because Walker takes mostly secular poems, many of them rife with the beginning of feminism.

I am taking a survey of 19th and 20th century American poetry and read this anthology as part of a class project. I was initially disappointed at being assigned this anthology because I had been hoping for Amy Lowell's imagism anthology. However, after reading and annotating the diversity of poems in this anthology, I am glad to have been assigned it. I actually enjoyed reading these women's poetry more so than Whitman, Melville, Whittier, Emerson, Longfellow, and the other hegemonic poets of the time.

Walker's aim was to illuminate the reading public of the popular female poets of the nineteenth century and remember the work of those who deserve another chance in the spotlight. I am thankful she edited and assembled the way she did, for I now have a few new favorite poets!

[Kristi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful anthology of important, but largely forgotten American women poets. I highly recommend this anthology for all readers who want a better understanding of women in the 19th century through the voice of their own poetry. Many of these poetess were popular in their own time, and are still worth reading today. I look forward to returning to this volume again and again. This would also be a useful classroom text, thought there is little contextualization given for the poems.Each author is the subject of a brief introduction, but the poems themselves are largely left to the reader's interpretation.

[Kristin Canfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

I good place to start for lesser-known, i.e. not Dickinson, lady poets in C19.