Was Sigourney a Poetess? The aesthetics of Victorian plenitude in Lydia Sigourney's poetry

Abstract

This article addresses aspects of Anglo-American Poetess Studies today, focusing on the resuscitation of the Poetess soubriquet itself, found to be questionable when applied to 19th-century US women poets generally, and deeply problematic when applied to Sigourney herself. Like their British peers, US women poets wrote Poetess poems of the sort recent theorizations of the Poetess describe, as did US men. But US women poets wrote many other kinds of poems also, whose parameters fall well outside those of the Poetess poem and whose diversity or, as it is called here, 'plenitude', speaks to a far more inclusive aesthetic than that warranted by Poetess poetics alone. What this aesthetic was, what empirical forces led to its emergence, and why it was vital to the flourishing of US women's lyric production in particular are questions that this article explores through my examination of Sigourney's poetry.