The Living Child’s Place in Piatt’s Dead Child Poems

Abstract

The Living Child’s Place in Piatt’s Dead Child Poems Jess Roberts (bio) Paula Bernat Bennett published her selected edition of Sarah Piatt’s poetry, Palace-Burner: The Selected Poems of Sarah Piatt (2001), over a century after Piatt’s last significant book publication, her two-volume Poems (1894). Recognizing the need to market Piatt in the twenty-first century, Bennett assembled poems whose aesthetic and political sensibilities would resonate with modern readers. The very qualities that rankled Piatt’s nineteenth-century contemporaries—her irony, ambiguity, and difficulty—are on full display in Palace-Burner and have animated and excited students of nineteenth-century women’s poetry.1 Despite her often adamant language, Bennett presents Palace-Burner’s version of Piatt as qualified. “It should be stressed,” she writes in the preface, “that this volume’s publication only marks the culmination of the first phase of Piatt’s recovery. Both the presentation of her life and the particular selection of poems should be viewed as provisional .… much still remains to be done before the full dimensions of her literary achievement and its significance can be assessed.”2 So even as she set Piatt before a new generation of readers, Bennett recognized that others needed to challenge and develop that initial vision in order to comprehend fully her work’s richness. [End Page 334] If Alexandra Socarides and Jennifer Putzi’s A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2017) or Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt’s The Cambridge History of American Poetry (2015) are any indication, how we comprehend Piatt, and consequently nineteenth-century American poetry, is expanding. With Piatt now a household name, something that twenty years ago seemed all but impossible, scholars in these collections situate Piatt’s writing in the context of realism (Elizabeth Renker), children’s poetry (Angela Sorby), Southern women’s poetry (Bennett), and Civil War poetry (Faith Barrett).3 Elsewhere, Matthew Giordano examines Piatt’s engagement with and place in periodical culture; Mary McCartin Wearn charts how her poems concerning loss and motherhood evolved over her writing life; and D. Zachary Finch discusses her “ethics of maternal melancholy.”4 This scholarship makes visible the range and versatility of Piatt’s poetry and helps fashion an increasingly nuanced picture of nineteenth-century poetic culture and a significant maker of poems. While this analysis has complicated our understanding of Piatt and the world of print in which her poems circulated, the terms of Bennett’s recovery of Piatt—a recovery that values irony, anger, and subversion—potentially limit how we study her poetry. Such is the case with the study of Piatt’s poems about child death. In the introduction to Palace-Burner, Bennett describes the poet as “turning elegy into confessional” and “send[ing] up howls of pain … not to be matched again in women’s poetry until Sylvia Plath.” Later, Bennett writes, in characteristically powerful language, “Piatt’s poems on child death … fall within nineteenth-century sentimentality’s discursive parameters, but hers is a sentimentality turned in on itself, devouring itself in rage.”5 As Wearn has similarly demonstrated, Piatt’s sometimes furious rejection of the terms of sentimental consolation represents an important part of her literary agenda. However, the focus on that rejection has obscured the range of emotion [End Page 335] and response that Piatt’s dead child poems represent.6 Furthermore, existing studies of those poems have focused overwhelmingly on poetry the scholars date after Piatt’s children had died. Piatt lost children early and often: her unnamed infant in August 1873, almost ten-year-old Victor in July 1874, ten-year-old Louis in 1884, and her adult son Donn in 1914 just before her own death. But the writer’s personal experience of child death neither inaugurated nor concluded her self-conscious critical engagement with the conventions governing child elegies. This essay aims to expand and sharpen our understanding of Piatt’s dead child poems by foregrounding poems she wrote before and after the death of her son Victor. First, it considers a group of poems that appeared in an anthology entitled Little Graves (1876), a collection that is representative of the sentimental tradition of child elegies...