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  • Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment by Wendy Dasler Johnson
  • Karen L. Kilcup
Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment. By Wendy Dasler Johnson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. ix + 282 pp. $40.00 paper/$40.00 e-book.

Most nineteenth-century American writers (and readers) comprehended a fact that took later scholars a while to relearn, or at least to acknowledge: all literature, even that which ostentatiously avoids contemporaneous debates, is political. They equally understood that poetry is always rhetorical. Exploring three writers' persuasive strategies, Wendy Dasler Johnson's Antebellum [End Page 155] American Women's Poetry provides a useful and engaging starting point for further rhetorical scholarship, as well as some productive avenues for inviting students to appreciate earlier American poetry more broadly.

Johnson's volume joins the many important recent projects on nineteenth-century American women's poetry, including Gary Williams's study of Julia Ward Howe, Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (1999); Paula Bernat Bennett's Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003); and, most recently, Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides's A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (2017). Nevertheless, as Johnson observes—and as I discovered when I researched my own rhetorical study, Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women's Environmental Writing, 1781–1924 (2013)—histories of women's rhetoric rarely feature poetry. Joining the many scholarly voices that have reclaimed a much-maligned discourse, Johnson foregrounds the antebellum era's most popular and prominent rhetorical mode, sentimentalism, contending, "Sentimental poets were out to change the world" (12). This claim animates the book as a whole and underwrites Johnson's desire to enable her own readers, as they confront twenty-first-century social injustice, to extend these poets' varied rhetorical practices.

Antebellum American Women's Poetry tackles three case studies: work by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and Julia Ward Howe. Divided into three sections, each foregrounding one element of classical rhetoric, the book emphasizes these women's verse as activism, broadly defined. Part 1, "Lessons in Logos," comprises a single chapter that explores the writers' "strategies and aims" as they negotiate expectations for women of their time, class, race, and place, and imagine ways they can authorize themselves as speakers and writers (17). Chapter sections foreground several "lessons": "Learn Dominant Discourses," particularly how to use metonymy, a mode that resurfaces throughout the book; "Write between Lives" (domestic and literary); "Count the Costs of Writing for Women"; and "Get It Together and Write Defiantly." The chapter's framing argument asserts that all three writers show how "reading, writing, and poetry build women's life raft on seas of American nineteenth-century culture that otherwise could engulf women in idealized roles of wife and mother" (18).

Part 2, "Ethos-in-Process: Sentimental Woman Poets and 'True Womanhood,'" explores how each poet establishes and exercises agency. Chapter 2 argues that Harper uses her rhetorical training to reanimate Margaret Garner's voice and shows how the poet "appropriates and projects a rhetorical persona directly into readers' imaginations" (53). In contrast, Johnson argues in chapter [End Page 156] 3 that Sigourney develops "the flexibly gendered ethos of the sentimental rhetor" in four incarnations: the poet as "the American Hemans," "the sermonizer," "the prophet," and the "pioneer woman elegist" (78, 101). Comparing Howe's poetry to that of Whittier and Longfellow, in chapter 4 Johnson argues that the least overtly political of her subjects, Howe, nonetheless uses "plural, fragmented personae" to reject traditional domesticity (109).

In part 3, "Pathos: Who Reads Sentimental Poetry? And Who Cares?" the book reinvigorates sentimentalism's characteristic rhetorical mode. Arguing that "Harper wants to move every reader toward active cultural critique" (145), chapter 5 highlights the poet's incisive pedagogical rhetoric, as Harper illuminates race-based "codes or rules of power" (138). Focusing on Sigourney's working-class status in chapter 6, Johnson argues that the poet's "strategic use of sentimental conventions such as agitated typography and especially apostrophe should not tag her as vulgar" because they enable her to use "privileged masculine sentimental discourse...

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