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...
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 ge...
In this evocative exploration, Cheryl Walker shows that there is a distinct tradition of women's poetry in America one that the poets themselves have not always been fully aware of and that individual poems can be read as manifestations of that tradition. Philomela, the nightingale of literary mythology, serves as a model for women poets, representing simultaneously both their particular forms of power and the frustrating powerlessness imposed on them by the cultural norms for women. The author identifies a number of archetypal motifs: the power fantasy, the sanctuary poem, the...
In this evocative exploration, Cheryl Walker shows that there is a distinct tradition of women's poetry in America one that the poets themselves ha...
