For a remarkable fifty-seven years (1854-1911), Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt was a successful, working poet, publishing in many of elite periodicals and presses of nineteenth-century America. In eleven years that she spent in Ireland (1882-1893), Piatt gained an international reputation as well, often being compared favorably in Irish and British presses to Brownings and Christina Rossetti. Because Piatt's poetry centered primarily on experiences of marriage and motherhood and was written in a distinctly genteel vocabulary, it was admired by nineteenth-century critics for its perceived fidelity to gender norms. In a review of her earliest and only unsigned volume, A Woman's Poems, William Dean Howells, for example, commended Piatt for having so aptly titled her work, finding her poetry praiseworthy for being so thoroughly in thought and expression, in subject and treatment (Recent Literature 773). And George D. Prentice, influential editor of Louisville Journal, speculated that if Piatt remained entirely true to herself, she would become first poet of [her] sex in United States (qtd. in Willard and Livermore 569). Not surprising, as America moved beyond its Victorian sensibilities, perception of Piatt as a artist transformed rapidly from an asset into a liability. In fact, one late nineteenth-century review criticized poet for her tendency to glorify trivial and suggested that Piatt's maternal instinct was sometimes at odds with her artistic faculty (Poetry and Verse). In modern era, Piatt's poetry could not bear often reductive scrutiny of a twentieth-century critical aesthetic. After her death in 1919, poet was archived with other sentimental women writers; in one 1934 biographical dictionary, Piatt was reduced to role of an essentially poet whose work reflected joys, griefs, and aspirations of ordinary woman's life (Johnson and Malone 557-58). Until end of twentieth century, then, Piatt was relegated to ranks of minor poets--penalized, like many of her female peers, for supposedly operating within narrow confines of a specifically feminine discourse. But Piatt's focus on womanly subjects and her sensibility were not simple reflections of conservative gender ideology, as nineteenth-century enthusiasts or twentieth-century detractors believed them to be. Alice Meynell, one of Piatt's contemporaries, recognized complexity beneath genteel facade of Piatt's poetry. Noting that term feminine was often a masked pejorative, Meynell reclaimed and redefined term on Piatt's behalf: [A] woman is best praised ... without word feminine, and she has cause to be glad if she deserves not to hear it. Nevertheless, it is reserved for one woman [Sarah Piatt] to show this very quality in a new manner--not as a grace, but as a force; not as a negative of something else, but as a positive thing, and therefore an energy standing sufficiently alone (32). Paula Bennett's recent scholarship has offered modern readers a new way of approaching Piatt's feminine aesthetic. While Bennett concedes that Piatt wrote some genteel poetry that was aligned with conservative, nineteenth-century sensibilities, she argues that Piatt's mature, irony-laden work was different. According to Bennett, Piatt's poetry does not underwrite nineteenth-century vision of woman as domestic, pious, and pure in House; instead, her poetry concerns the formation of middle-class women's subjectivity and works toward deconstruction of Angel (Poets 139). Identifying 'woman's place' in modern world as Piatt's primary subject, Bennett argues that poet explores social, political, and literary implications of gender issues for women. Reversing reading of Piatt as insular in her focus on womanly issues, Bennett establishes Piatt's deep commitment to her poetry's political role in public sphere (Poets 139). …
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Aug 1, 2006
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