The Female Poets of America

Rufus Wilmot Griswold

Jan 1856 · Parry & McMillan

Ratings and reviews

A certain nineteenth century author (nathaniel Hawthorne I think) once referred to America's "hordes of scribbling women." Famous anthologist Rufus Griswold has collected the "scribblings" of dozens of antebellum lady authors in The Female Poets of America (1849, revised 1856). While this book is in print via Forgotten Books, most of the names will not be familiar to the average reader. There are some famous names--Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Margaret Fuller--but most will be recognized by students of Victorian literature or Women's Studies majors. (No Emily Dickinson: Her works were mostly later.) Still, it would be unjust to dismiss these poets out of hand. At the very least, a reader can learn what sort of poetry was popular before the Civil War. Most of it, if we accept the stereotypes, we would expect to be preachments, prim and proper moralizings, or cute "girly" lyrics by women named Honoria or Octavia. There are such poems, but there is variety. There are laments over the plights of Indians and slaves, pleas for the poor, some early feminism, and even scenes of everyday life at the time. The poems are largely metrical and rhyming, but some ladies experimented with blank verse. The poems are often long--frustratingly sometimes--but they were meant to be an evening's entertainment in those days before Netflix. Yes, there are plenty of poems about death (Emily Judson's poem on the subject is so dark that Poe might have cringed), but the ladies tend to soften it with tender farewells and hopes of heavenly reunions. There are soap opera-like love poems, but some are retellings of medieval epics. There is piety, but the book is far from a hymnal.There is plenty of paeans to nature, but remember how rapidly industrial America was expanding then. (On that point, the books references to "the west" often mean what we would call the midwest.) In short, this anthology is largely a product of its time. If you're curious about what people read back then, if you're a history buff, or you're a poetry lover, give it a try. You won't like it all, but some of these authors may surprise you.