Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt (review)

Was there another first-rate nineteenth-century American woman poet whose work might rival Emily Dickinson's? Paula Bennett answers this question in the affirmative, naming Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919) as Dickinson's peer. In support of this answer, Bennett has spent years combing the archives, and one of the most important contributions of her new book Palace-Burner is its inclusion of Piatt's previously uncollected journal poetry, for it was in the journals, according to Bennett, that Piatt published much of her most radical experimental work.

Published in University of Illinois's distinguished American Poetry Recovery Series, Palace-Burner is the kind of volume that readers of Legacy will find particularly useful. It includes a generous offering of Piatt's extensive oeuvre, a helpful introduction, lengthy notes, and a bibliography. Though she is all but unknown today, Piatt had a considerable reputation in the nineteenth century. However, only one full-length study of her work has been undertaken, a Ph.D. dissertation by Jean Allen Hanawalt in 1981. More recently, Piatt's work has appeared in several anthologies. Paula Bennett has been her foremost promoter, tireless in her determination to restore Piatt's reputation and effective in drawing attention to her complexities.

The problem with Piatt's poetry, according to Bennett, is that she wrote in two modes: the genteel, which it is hard to stir up much interest in today, and a more modern (and controversial) style that often offended nineteenth-century tastes by its roughness and difficulty. Following in the poetic footsteps of the Brownings, Piatt put much of her more controversial poetry in dramatic monologue or dialogue form. Since the reader is not provided with exposition or commentary, s/he must then fill in its context and its implications through what Bennett calls an "ironic" reading. A case in point is the title poem, which begins, "She has been burning palaces. 'To see / The sparks look pretty in the wind?' Well, yes— / And something more" (39). It takes some time before we understand that the conversation is one between the speaker and her son, who blithely applauds this woman of the Paris Commune about to be executed whom he sees in a newspaper picture. The son's heroic identification between the Communarde and his mother ironically causes the mother to face her own limitations: "Does the boy not know my soul to be / Languid and worldly, with a dainty need/ For light and music?" (39-40). It is ironic that the son's faith in his mother's courage elicits in her a sense of her own faithlessness. Other uses of irony require the reader to read against the express language of the poem, as where—in very Dickinson-esque fashion—the speaker "thanks" God in "A New Thanksgiving" for her own suffering and death. (See Dickinson's "The Heart asks Pleasure first.")

Bennett's point, however, is that Sarah Piatt was very different from Emily Dickinson. "Piatt's kind of poetry—poetry wedded to social commitment, to politics—could not be more antithetical to Dickinson's largely insular and language-oriented art and should not be compared to it. In concerns and emphases, these two powerful women writers, born a scant six years apart, lived worlds apart" (l). Some readers, of course, will want to question this characterization of Dickinson; Dickinson's work has increasingly been seen as involving both politics and social commentary. Though Dickinson did not write about motherhood as Piatt did, issues of gender and the Civil War (two of Piatt's other principal concerns) were certainly among her preoccupations, as Shira Wolosky and a score of feminist critics (Bennett herself among them) have been quick to explain.

Palace-Burner gives the reader ample reason to critique those who would too quickly "place" Piatt as a genteel writer whose work makes few claims on a contemporary reader. There is...