Sarah Piatt’s Realism in 1870s Print Culture

Recognized since the 1990s as a major artist, Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836–1919) sustained a prolific career for over half a century, beginning in the 1850s and spanning the entire postbellum period.¹ She published for multiple audiences in venues ranging from political newspapers and literary magazines to anthologies to children’s periodicals. Piatt’s career offers a foundational correction to traditional literary histories of the US postbellum era on two major fronts. Such histories typically describe realism as a movement that “emerged” in the mid-1880s and transpired exclusively in fiction, with William Dean Howells as its legendary champion.² Meanwhile, poetry allegedly languished in a slough of retrograde idealism more (in)famously known across twentieth-century historiography as “the genteel tradition.” This still-influential derogatory term originated with George Santayana and has stuck for over a century, essentially writing poetry out of postbellum literary history.³ Yet Piatt developed a sustained realist project well before the better-known phenomenon of Howellsian realism and did so specifically in the arena of poetry. Focusing on the particular critical climate of the 1870s—including revealing responses to her work by influential literary arbiters Bayard Taylor and Howells—this essay demonstrates that Piatt employed ironic realism to navigate the hegemonic print culture of romantic idealism in which she was simultaneously pursuing her career.⁴

Even with Piatt scholarship only now in its second wave since her recovery in the 1990s, her relation to genteel convention has already become a focus for Paula Bernat Bennett, Matthew Giordano, Mary McCartin Wearn, and Jess Roberts.⁵ As Bennett points out, Piatt’s extensive oeuvre includes very successful genteel-style lyrics, including thirty poems in the Atlantic Monthly, which John Timberman Newcomb calls “the institutional epicenter of genteel culture.”⁶ Yet Piatt’s poems also plunge into what Bennett calls “the real,” the “everyday dramas of family and social life and the life of the nation.”⁷ This hinge in her poetic practice underwrote her oblivion in the twentieth century (when she was misread as just another sweet singer) as well as her recent recovery as a major poet responding to the social fractures of her age.⁸ All these first-wave scholars agree that Piatt’s engagement with genteel poetic convention is central to her art.

Bennett has already identified irony as Piatt’s signature mode, and I extend Bennett’s insight by showing that irony functions specifically as her most consistent and characteristic realist technique. ⁹ As I will show, Piatt deftly implements her realist irony even in poems that Bennett classifies as genteel—an omission on Bennett’s part that also serves as a notable sign of just how subtly Piatt navigated this terrain.¹⁰ Irony is of course an inherently dualistic rhetorical mode, and Piatt’s ironic treatment of romantic idealism falls squarely within broader nineteenth-century realist practice. Scholars of both American and Victorian literary realism have long stressed that transatlantic realist practice characteristically worked in dualistic forms of multiple kinds (including such phenomena as gaps, juxtapositions, disconnections, and contrasts in perspective). Such dualistic practices served a foundational realist stance of distinction from other familiar literary modes, among which idealism and romance loomed especially large. George Levine’s classic study of Victorian realism argues that realism “defines itself against the excesses, both stylistic and narrative” of these representational antagonists. Alison Byerly points out that Victorian realism’s essential stance is “to contradict,” and, on the US side, Michael Davitt Bell stresses that realist practice is rooted thematically and stylistically in “a contest between competing styles and perspectives.”¹¹

Piatt’s realist irony engendered an equally dualistic reader-response scenario in which readers might perceive only her poems’ genteel surfaces. Bennett points out that Piatt was well aware that readers might understand her poems on different levels.¹² Giordano further demonstrates that Piatt wrote an awareness of her poems’ multiple scenes of reading into her aesthetic practice.¹³ Her many dramatic poems in particular explore exactly such variable interpretive scenarios. “The Palace-Burner” (1872), currently Piatt’s best-known poem, tracks different responses to...