American Women Poets Of The Nineteenth Century Book

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.

Library Journal

This volume of 27 women poets whose works deserve more recognition intends to be revisionist, making available both minorities (black and Jewish) and writers from the Far West (as opposed to New York and Boston) that have not been previously represented. The selections reveal a wide range of themes: slavery and abolition; doubt and religious consolation; insanity and consumption; female education and equal access; opium and alcoholism; the plight of Native Americans; tributes to Lincoln and freedom; and love, sanctuary, hardship, and secret sorrow. Walker provides a long introduction on the period and evaluative author notes, which are helpful since most writers will not be familiar. Though contemporary poems differ noticeably in form from those found here, readers will find numerous good poems with more than historical interest. For those who believe literary canons need reconstruction, this new anthology will be welcome.-- Addie Lee Bracy, formerly with Beaver Coll. Lib., Glenside, Pa.