Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

This book explores sentimental poetry, an often overlooked, yet significant and persuasive pre-Civil War American discourse. At a time when a woman speaking before a mixed-gender audience might be labeled "promiscuous," many women presented their views through sentimental poetry, a blend of affect with intellect.

In Plain Sight explores how the poetry of nineteenth-century American women that was once so visible within American culture could have, with the exception of that by Emily Dickinson, so thoroughly disappeared from literary history. By investigating erasure not merely as something that was done to these women but as the result of the conventions that once made the circulation of their poetry possible in the first place, this volume offers the first book-length analysis of the conventions of nineteenth-century American women's poetry. While each of the chapters focuses on a specific convention, taken together they tell the complicated story of nineteenth-century American women's poetry, tracing the spaces within literary culture where it lived and thrived, the spaces from which it was always in the process of vanishing. By reclaiming these conventions as a constitutive part of nineteenth-century American women's poetry, this book asks readers to take seriously the work these women produced and the role their work might play in remapping American literary history.

This volume is both an essential resource for undergraduates and graduates studying Victorian and Decadent literature and an instructive work for enthusiastic readers of verse. The wide span of the 1872–1900 epoch enables readers to appreciate in great depth the literary developments that led to the fin de siècle, unlike most studies of this period, which focus solely on the 1890s, with no relation to cultural and historical developments in the previous two important decades.