"A Lesson From" the Magazines: Sarah Piatt and the Postbellum Periodical Poet

In 1878 Sarah Piatt published "From North and South" in the children's magazine the Youth's Companion. Subtitled "(A Lesson from the Newspaper)," the poem dramatizes a conversation between a mother and her daughter as they peruse two letters printed in the newspaper—one that sketches a beautiful and glamorous Northern woman as she appeared at a ball, and another that details the contrasting "Misery" and "Death" of the South. The last stanza of the poem reads,

"That's from the North" "Now turn and read
    A letter from the South, I say."
"'Nothing but Death is here'"—"Indeed!"
    "'And Misery following Death.'" "Ah me!—
That's of some people, too, you see."

(19–23)

As its subtitle indicates, "From North and South" is a didactic poem, with the mother teaching the daughter, and, presumably, the poet teaching her youthful readers, that life is made up of both joy and sorrow. The poem contains a history lesson as well: its depiction of the fall of the South after the Civil War and during Reconstruction was a continual preoccupation for Piatt, who spent her childhood in the antebellum South and her adulthood in the postbellum North.

Yet the poem also offers another lesson, one that has more to do with how to read Piatt's poetry than with any tutorial about the Civil War's legacy or the dual nature of life. "From North and South" is a meta-poem, portraying within a poem printed in a magazine the experience of reading a periodical. It is thus a significant piece in the poet's oeuvre. Piatt was one of the most prolific periodical poets in the late nineteenth century. Although she eventually published seventeen book collections, she began her career in the 1850s writing for her childhood hometown newspaper, the Louisville Journal.¹ From the 1860s to the 1910s, she placed close to three hundred poems in venues ranging from the New York Congregationalist magazine the Independent, to the children's magazine Wide-Awake, to the respected literary monthlies Harper's and the Atlantic. The exposure Piatt gained in these periodicals helped win her widespread acclaim, leading E. C. Stedman, the dean of postbellum poetry critics, to dub her in 1885 "our best-known Western poetess."² Yet despite her productivity and reputation, she became, by the early twentieth century, as little known as most of her contemporaries. Brushed aside by modernists and New Critics as simply another sentimental poetess, she was erased from the dominant narratives of American poetic history.

Within the last ten years, scholars have successfully recovered Piatt's work, resulting in her admission into the most recent editions of the Heath and the Norton anthologies of American literature (2002, 2003). Piatt is now steadily gaining attention as a nineteenth-century American woman poet second in importance only to Emily Dickinson. In light of her publication history, she represents a type of poetic practice far removed from Dickinson's poetics of privacy and correspondence. By regularly placing her poems in national magazines and newspapers, Piatt practiced a manifestly public form of poetic authorship. In this respect, the overarching "Lesson" that the meta-poem "North and South" points to is the importance of the periodical context in shaping her career. Indeed, given her extensive periodical publication, it is imperative when reading Piatt that we revisit the question of what it meant to write poetry for postbellum magazines. If we ever hope to understand the breadth and depth of her achievement, we must recover the periodical context of her poems and read them precisely as periodical pieces—that is, as literary works that are constituted by and that respond to the particular circumstances of their periodical publication.³

Specifically, this essay contends that late-nineteenth-century periodical culture provides a historically accurate lens through which we can...