Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry

by Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, Paula B. Bennett (Editor)

Over the past decade, Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919) has emerged as the most highly regarded and most frequently anthologized nineteenth-century American woman poet after Emily Dickinson. Published heavily in all the period's most prestigious journals, Piatt was widely celebrated in her own day as a gifted stylist in the genteel tradition. Based entirely on archival research, Palace-Burner reveals Piatt's other side: an ironic, experimental poet who pushed the limits of Victorian language, the sentimental female persona, and what women's poetry could say. Paula Bernat Bennett's astutely edited selection of Piatt's mature work - much of it never before collected - explains why her "deviant poetics" caused her peers such discomfort and why her poems provide such fertile ground for study today.

Genres: Poetry

264 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 2001

About the author

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (Sallie M. Bryan; August 11, 1836 – December 22, 1919) was an American poet. Sometimes publishing under "Sallie M. Bryan", she was a prolific and popular poet during her lifetime, associating with prominent literary figures in the United States and abroad. During her career, she published some 450 poems across eighteen volumes and in leading periodicals of the day.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The problems of the American South. The death of soldiers, lovers, children. The pity of poverty. The despair of a woman’s lot.

[Kristi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Piatt’s poems are hauntingly forceful, poignantly wrought, and condemningly in their emotional honest . Her predominant themes are sorrowful, meditating on death and the hardships of women, including maternal grief and unsuitable marriage. Her poetry is also notable sympathetic to African Americans and meditate on the tragedy of slavery. One of my new favorite poets.