The Poetess

This chapter organizes an unlikely comparison between the Black feminist activist poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the White Harvard Professor and best-selling poet of the nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, under the sign of the popular nineteenth-century figure of the Poetess. Unlike apostrophe or personification or prosody, the chapter emphasizes that the Poetess is not a figure many lyric theorists still associate with the structure of poetics. It stresses that the Poetess was a figure intimately associated with the work of women poets in the nineteenth century, but it was also, like apostrophe and personification and prosody, a figure that was detachable from the work of any particular poet. Nineteenth-century White male poets like Poe and Whitman employed Poetess poetics, and that was possible because the Poetess was not consubstantial with the author's gender or sexuality. Yet, as the chapter argues, using the figure of the Poetess was not like using poetic genres such as the elegy or the epistle; since the Poetess was more like a trope than a genre, it could be as definite and slippery as a turn of phrase, turning through many prosodic and rhetorical genres at once. The chapter aims to understand these nineteenth-century Black poetics in order to propose a new literary history, a new historical poetics, a new account of the invention of American lyric.