After Wings

This chapter focuses on selected poems that Sarah Piatt published between 1866 and the mid-seventies. This period was simultaneous to the evolving debates about reality categories traced in Chapter 2 but prior to the oft-construed advent or high point of realism in the eighties and nineties. Even at this relatively early stage of her career, Piatt articulated a consistent realist counterpoetics that challenged the conventions of romantic idealism from the inside—that is, from within the culture in which she was simultaneously pursuing her career. These poems reproduce conventions of genteel poetry in complex forms of reiteration that function as replication or indictment. This poetic practice is also one of the keys to Piatt’s realism.