Topic Clusters
Exploration: Women’s Poetry: From Manuscript to Print
This cluster of works by women poets from the American eighteenth century provides a sampling of the verse that was produced by educated women all over the colonies, a practice that ranged widely with regard to authorial aspirations. Some of these authors wrote for self-expression and personal fulfillment in a context that offered them little in the way of cultural companionship; others wrote as a demonstration of “accomplishment,” of skills and arts befitting a lady of social position; others wanted to reach a larger world, to find a public in a time before the automation of printing and publishing and the vast expansion of the American reading audience.1. On the web, search for home pages of American printing museums and of S.H.A.R.P., the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, and browse the chronologies and brief histories of printing and publishing in the eighteenth century. What did it mean to be a published author at that time? How big an audience could a writer hope for, and what were the logistics of bringing a poem into print? What social obstacles might stand in the way of a woman author appearing in print? Where do you see those aspirations expressed in the poems in this NAAL cluster?
2. How does this cluster influence your thinking about the construction of our cultural history: the ethics and complications of recovering a “private” discourse, and setting those words into the same context as literary works originally intended to be read by everyone? Letters, journals, light verse shared among a few friends, devotional poems that never saw the light of day in the lifetime of the author—what questions or cautions should we bear in mind as we read these documents now, in the context of a literary anthology or a college course in the American literary past?