Editors’ Preface

This special issue of ESQ celebrates the landmark contributions of Paula Bernat Bennett to the recovery of nineteenth-century US women poets and the twentieth anniversary of the publication of her groundbreaking anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets (1998). Bennett’s career has spanned five decades, beginning in the late 1970s with essays on Emily Dickinson and including most recently her preface to the second edition of her Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet (2018). Having worked alongside other scholars since the 1980s to establish Dickinson’s undisputed canonicity, Bennett has over the last twenty years introduced students and scholars in the US and beyond to the range and diversity of other US women poets, not only with Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, but also with her innovative monograph, Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003). Her archival recovery and anthologizing of these forgotten women poets have helped other scholars develop new insights into this previously discounted area within American studies. Her critical books, edited collections, and essays continue to offer highly influential frameworks through which to understand women writers, particularly nineteenth-century ones. Moreover, her 2001 edition of Palace Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt has been instrumental in facilitating the rediscovery and reappraisal of this unique and significant poet.

This special issue begins with three scene-setting microessays that chart Bennett’s career. The first focuses on Bennett’s changing views of and approaches to Dickinson as they respond to developments in Dickinson studies, while the second centers on Bennett’s recovery of women poets, particularly her work on Lydia Sigourney. The final microessay turns to Bennett’s work on Phoebe Cary and Piatt. The four full-length essays that follow each use Bennett’s scholarship as a starting point, and each contributor dialogues with her scholarship to produce work that significantly adds to this field’s current thinking. These essays will become important reference points that both extend and engage with Bennett’s scholarly recovery work.

Reading Civil War-era poems by Julia Ward Howe, Rose Terry Cooke, Lucy Larcom, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Sarah Piatt, in the first essay Eliza Richards considers how and why women poets develop a highly-wrought style, one that foregrounds the materiality of language, in order to represent the Civil War’s violence. Framing her analysis with a discussion of Henry James’ critique of what he termed the Azarian school, Richards argues that these women writers use luxurious descriptive excess to reckon with the challenges of representing aspects of the war that are both unknown and unseen. In the second essay, Christa Holm Vogelius examines Sarah Piatt’s images of mirrors and mimicry as she considers the relationship between original and copy in the writer’s poetics. Focusing particularly on poems that represent works of visual art, Vogelius argues that Piatt uses ekphrasis to critique the figure of the Poetess, who deploys a feminine mode of poetic mimicry. By producing copies that seemingly have no original, Piatt unsettles the relationship between embodiment and representation that readers expect from a female-authored sentimental poem.

Also focusing on Sarah Piatt, Jessica Roberts considers how the poet responds to the well-established conventions of the child elegy. Reading a group of Piatt’s poems about child loss, Roberts attends particularly to the ways Piatt represents the still-living child, arguing that she places such children in the child elegy in order to address the inescapable fact of the child’s mortality. In the final essay, Elizabeth Renker argues that Piatt’s work offers a sustained critique of the culture of romantic idealism, even as she also built her career as a widely-acclaimed poet by participating in that culture. Noting that Bennett for the most part excluded Piatt’s more genteel poems from Palace-Burner, Renker finds in some of these same poems a commitment to realism. She further argues that Piatt’s work clearly challenges the conventional argument that the postbellum turn toward realism happens only in prose works.

As these essays attest, Paula Bernat Bennett has influenced many scholars...