Covering a wide range of poets and poems, this volume narrates a compelling history of nineteenth-century American women's poetry.

Introduction: making history: thinking about nineteenth-century American women's poetry Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides; Part I. 1800-40, American Poesis and the National Imaginary: 1. Claiming Lucy Terry Prince: literary history and the problem of early African-American women poets Mary Louise Kete; 2. Before the poetess: women's poetry in the early republic Tamara Harvey; 3. The passion for poetry in Lydia Sigourney and Elizabeth Oakes Smith Kerry Larson; 4. Album verse and the poetics of scribal circulation Michael C. Cohen; 5. Presents of mind: Lydia Sigourney, gift book culture, and the commodification of poetry Elizabeth A. Petrino; 6. The friendship elegy Desirée Henderson; 7. Gendered Atlantic: Lydia Sigourney and Felicia Hemans Gary Kelly; Part II. 1840-65, Unions and Disunion: 8. Women, Transcendentalism, and The Dial: poetry and poetics Michelle Kohler; 9. Poets of the loom, spinners of verse: working-class women's poetry and The Lowell Offering Jennifer Putzi; 10. Women's transatlantic poetic network Páraic Finnerty; 11. Making and unmaking a canon: American women's poetry and the nineteenth-century anthology Alexandra Socarides; 12. 'What witty sally': Phoebe Cary's poetics of parody Faith Barrett; 13. Nineteenth-century American women's poetry of slavery and abolition Eric Gardner; 14. Fever-dreams: antebellum Southern women poets and the Gothic Paula Bennett; 15. The Civil War language of flowers Eliza Richards; 16. Poetry and bohemianism Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley; Part III. 1865-1900, Experiment and Expansion: 17. Women poets and American literary realism Elizabeth Renker; 18. Verse forms Cristanne Miller; 19. Braided relations: towards a history of nineteenth-century American Indian women's poetry Robert Dale Parker; 20. Frances Harper and the poetry of reconstruction Monique-Adelle Callahan; 21. (Hear the bird): Sarah Piatt and the dramatic monologue Jess Roberts; 22. Women writers and the hymn Claudia Stokes; 23. Women poets, child readers Angela Sorby; 24. Emma Lazarus transnational Shira Wolosky; 25. The creation of Emily Dickinson and the study of nineteenth-century American women's poetry Mary Loeffelholz.