Ballad Knowledge and the Poetics of Repetition

Chapter 3 explores a genre (the ballad) that was wildly popular in nineteenth-century America, and investigates the ways in which women poets entered into discussions about authorship, poetics, and gender through their engagements with it. Focusing in particular on tropes of faithlessness, pride, laziness, and general “badness” that had long marked traditional ballads, this chapter shows how these tropes came to be associated with women and how American periodicals seemed to embrace the circulation of such ballads. But as women poets took up this genre and were faced with how to rewrite this female figure, they pushed its primary convention—repetition—to its limits in order to make explicit the particular problem that accompanies the recitation of “ballad knowledge” for women. Instead of looking away from the scenes of repetition that disempower women, these ballads go right to the center, employing repetitions to new ends.

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.

The Sick Preface

Chapter 2 takes up the paratextual convention of the preface to a book by a single author. In the prefaces written by or about largely unknown, often small-town, lower-class women poets who existed far outside the canon’s gaze, we find a particular rhetorical convention employed ubiquitously over the course of the century. In these prefaces, women are declared to be both physically sick and resistant to the idea of public readers. While this convention got its start in the antebellum culture of charity, it persisted into the century’s final decade, and along the way the women poets who used it (and were used by it) registered both their compliance and resistance. By looking closely at both the rhetoric of these prefaces and the poems that follow them, this chapter unpacks these women poets’ relationships to a convention that declared them unworthy of any future readership.

Introduction

This Introduction describes the presence and absence of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, both then and now; situates this book’s approach and method within the field of feminist recovery work, looking closely at the central role that subjectivity has played in past efforts to define the field; and explains how and why a study of conventions can provide a necessary intervention at this moment in nineteenth-century poetry studies. It articulates an argument for why the field should turn away from what is exceptional (namely, a study of individual women writers) and towards what might be seen as commonplace (namely, the conventions that those women employed).

Afterword

We arrive now at what I call “The Problem of Emily Dickinson.” This is neither a chapter proper nor a “conclusion,” but an “afterword,” precisely because Dickinson has, for a very long time, gotten the only word. It is not simply that the poems, or even the image, of Dickinson has eclipsed the literary landscape that I have tried to make visible in this book—she need not, as she herself claimed, take up that much space—but that the ...

Collaborative Composition and Sororal Poetics

Chapter 4 showcases the collaborative nature of American women’s poetics: they often composed in groups, they conceived of poetic practice as a shared and communal endeavor, and their editors promoted the image of their collaboration. This chapter asks how a collaborative approach to the writing and publishing of poetry undercuts notions of individual genius and solitary creative labor that is now associated with women’s poetry. By looking closely at the compositional practices of several sets of nineteenth-century American sisters and at the ways they were each presented to a reading public, this chapter argues that such collaborations made these sisters visible and popular in their own day in ways that they could no longer be once ideas about poetic authorship began to change.