American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century - Cheryl Walker

This publication marks the first time in a hundred years that a wide
range of nineteenth-century American women's poetry has been accessible
to the general public in a single volume. Included are the humorous
parodies of Phoebe Cary and Mary Weston Fordham and the stirring
abolitionist poems of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Maria Lowell, and
Rose Terry Cooke. Included, too, are haunting reflections on madness,
drug use, and suicide of women whose lives, as Cheryl Walker explains,
were often as melodramatic as the poems they composed and published.
In addition to works by more than two dozen poets, the anthology
includes ample headnotes about each author's life and a brief critical
evaluation of her work. Walker's introduction to the volume provides
valuable contextual material to help readers understand the cultural
background, economic necessities, literary conventions, and personal
dynamics that governed women's poetic production in the nineteenth
century.