19th Century Women's Poetry

This section was prepared by Sharon M. Harris, University of Nebraska, Co-Editor of LEGACY.

There are now several valuable poetry collections of 19th-century U.S. women poets available, including Paula Bernat Bennett's Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (1997), Janet Gray's She Wields a Pen (1997), and Cheryl Walker's American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1992), as well as excellent work in Dickinson studies. To complement these collections, the following poems are presented as additional examples of the rich field of nineteenth-century women's poetry.

The majority of these poems are not included in the recent anthologies; but they are selections drawn from nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anthologies and may offer interesting comparisons.

Bibliographical References
AA Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. An American Anthology, 1787-1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900.
AP Untermeyer, Louis, ed. American Poetry. From the Beginning to Whitman. NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1931.
FP May, Caroline. The American Female Poets. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1848.
LB Rittenhouse, Jessie B. The Little Book of American Poetry, 1787-1900. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1915.
PT Cooke, George Willis. The Poets of Transcendentalism: An Anthology. New York: Burt Franklin, 1903.
SP Parks, Edd Winfield, ed. Southern Poets. NY: American Book Co., 1916.