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Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert’s Loew’s Bridge: A Broadway Idyl (1867) is a long poem of observations, associations, and musings about the view from a pedestrian overpass that spanned the traffic-clogged intersection of Broadway and Fulton Street in New York City for just over one year of the 1860s. Completed April 15, 1867, the bridge was intended to relieve traffic so heavy that it endangered life and limb, but on July 21, 1868, the Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen recorded that the Supreme Court had declared it “a failure as a public convenience” and “a serious obstacle to the free and uninterrupted uses of the streets.”1 Loew’s Bridge is the earliest and, at 720 lines, by far the longest of the three postbellum poems I consider in this book. It differs from Sarah Piatt’s “A Child’s Party” and Frances Harper’s “Aunt Chloe” in being nonnarrative and, in places, antinarrative , in that it introduces narrative elements only to leave them abruptly behind. While both Piatt and Harper use regular quatrains, Lambert ’s prosody is improvisational; she intersperses blocks of iambic pentameter with shorter lines and sections that break into irregular lyric stanzas . Some of Lambert’s language rings of conventional sentimentality in a way that numbs the minds of readers schooled in modernist poetics—a recurrent obstacle in the recovery of much noncanonical nineteenth-century poetry. The poem’s fissured structure can make it appear that Lambert achieved nothing other than the dogged production of length. But it is precisely this fissuring that gives the piece its complexity, inviting a serious reading that draws on strategies for approaching not only sentimentality but also satire and the modern long poem, an aggregation of moments whose cohesion is neither didactic nor narrative nor affective. Biographical uncertainties have haunted the recuperation of Lambert’s poetry. Loew’s Bridge, originally published anonymously, and Poems (also What One Is NotWas Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert’s Poetics of Self-Reconstruction 7 1867) by Mary Eliza Perine Tucker (not yet Lambert) were reprinted through the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers; they are in the first of four volumes of Collected Black Women’s Poetry (1988).2 Both books have also been included in the Database of African American Poetry 1760–1900,3 an electronic archive sold on compact disk and accessible through research library sites on the World Wide Web. The incorporation of these works into African American literary projects has been based largely on a reference to a Mrs. M. E. Lambert in Mrs. N. F. Mossell ’s The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894). 4 Mossell was in fact referring to Mollie E. Lambert, an African American woman born in Ohio and educated in Toronto, who published in the A.M.E. Church Review and was prominent in Detroit’s racial uplift efforts during the last four decades of the century.5 The actual author of Loew’s Bridge was a white native of Alabama educated in New York who returned north to sell her poems and seek work as a journalist after the Civil War impoverished her father, Edward M. Perine, and her first husband, John M. Tucker. (She married her second husband, a Colonel Lambert of Philadelphia, in 1871.)6 As much because her works were classified black as because she turns out to have been two different people, reading Lambert becomes an instance when the project of opening American literary history to authentic differences clashes with the theoretical task of opposing the essentialization of race. What difference does it make to how the poem is read, or whether it is read today at all, that its author was a white Southerner? The misattribution called attention to works that may have remained overlooked; because of their implication in the slave system, white southern women authors of the nineteenth century have been little sought for recuperation. At the same time, the text’s mistaken contextualization in African American writing helps to call attention to how Lambert represents the construction of racial whiteness, a thread in her work that readers might well miss if her own whiteness were taken for granted. Many women before Lambert began literary careers when their husbands or fathers could not provide financial support, but the specifics of her situation illustrate a broader historical change in the myths and actualities shaping women’s lives. Late in the century the press would announce the ascendancy of the...

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