Anthology Publication and the Woman Poet
Chapter 1 investigates the moment at mid-century when American women’s poetry was, for the first time, being collected and marketed to a wide audience. By looking closely at the structures and visual components of the anthologies of the late 1840s, this chapter shows just how vexed the placement of the “American woman poet” into literary culture was. While women poets had been deployed in the service of a narrative about American literary culture earlier, it was with the creation of these anthologies that a whole host of conventions got embraced by writers and editors alike. By highlighting the diversity of approaches and poems contained within these anthologies, this chapter returns to the ways in which women’s poetry resisted being flattened into one kind of poem and women poets into one image.