Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry by Jennifer Putzi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry by Jennifer Putzi Wendy Dasler Johnson FAIR COPY: RELATIONAL POETICS AND ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN WOMEN’S POETRY, by Jennifer Putzi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 320 pp. $69.95 hardback; $69.95 ebook. How do we read women’s American antebellum poetry? Or do we at all? Some of us asking these question have, like Jennifer Putzi, found clues that suggest how to read the poems and why so few do now. But such a search requires the dedicated attention Putzi gives to poetry collections before the Civil War, women’s periodicals, library and personal archives, and newspapers. If we are looking for traditional conventions of lone Romantic poetic genius, we might simply dismiss the vast majority of these women and their works. Perhaps that is because we still do not “know how to read their poems” as Cheryl Walker observed in conversation thirty years ago. Putzi’s thoroughly researched Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry offers us a framework, a poetics that allows more of us to read this genre with understanding. Her sense of “relational poetics” foregrounds imitation, community engagement, and collaborative partners. She finds these shaping conditions comprise “an earlier model of poetic authorship” that she argues is often erased today but which invited antebellum women poets to publish (p. 20). Two emphases characterize Putzi’s approach to each chapter subject: relational poetics and her persistent, thorough explorations “elbow-deep in the letters” and archives (p. x). Her chapters explore, respectively, Lydia Huntley Sigourney as the American Felicia Hemans; millworker women poets of the Lowell Offering magazine (1840-1845), whose imitation underscores their middle-class ambitions; Sarah Louisa Forten’s use of pseudonyms and “we” to support and obscure her position as a Black abolitionist activist; Maria James’s and collaborators’ simultaneous pride and ambivalence toward poetic individualism; and Elizabeth Akers Allen’s protest against verse imitators and impersonators who claimed her poems. Discussion of Sigourney as the American Hemans gives Putzi opportunity to examine some contemporary critics’ disapproval of Sigourney’s imitative prosody and the common feeling of her elegies—as well as, by extension, perhaps a chance to acknowledge today’s lingering discomfort [End Page 160] with antebellum women poets’ relational poetics. Sigourney’s feisty retorts to Edgar Allen Poe on these matters demonstrate the confidence and energy of an enormously popular antebellum woman poet, Putzi argues. As Hemans acts as model for her, likewise Sigourney guides thousands of women poets paradoxically thriving in the face of what Putzi terms “dominant” or “elite” poetic conventions (pp. 25, 34). Repeatedly, Putzi’s book acknowledges contemporary and current critical disapproval but then emphasizes the advantages that so-called limitations afforded antebellum women poets. Notably, she reframes imitation as a chief support to the millworker poets of the Lowell Offering rather than a shortcoming. Mill operative by day and Lowell Offering editor by night, Harriet Farley in “The Mouse’s Visit” (1844) overtly plays with Scottish dialect and the prosody of Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse” (1785), enhancing her status as the well-read and imaginative director of the Lowell Offering. Imitation situates Farley and the Lowell Offering’s contributing poets in a wider literary marketplace, Putzi argues, setting “literary skills of the operatives on display in a way that only poetry will allow” (p. 76). Likewise, the collective “we” deployed by free Black poet Forten echoes her activist father’s proclamation: “We never will separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population [. . .] they are our brethren” (p. 113). Likewise, Forten’s “we” is distinctly not the solitary Romantic lyric “I.” It is a demonstration of oneness with her people, and they are surely African American, both enslaved and free. The pronoun indeed claims her equal citizenship with white Americans, exhorting every American that “we” must turn from slaveholding to our founding values: “Where—where is the nation so erring as we, / Who claim the proud name of the ‘HOME OF THE FREE’?” (p. 119). Only such exhaustive archival work as Putzi’s could have recovered a letter from Forten’s father, revealing that the author of poems appearing in William Garrison...