Book Review: "Major Voices: 19th Century American Women's Poetry"

“Major Voices: 19th Century American Women’s Poetry” showcases the work of 10 female American poets – most of them quite notable in their own time but rarely considered or anthologized since. Observing 19th century America through the lense of its female poets is an intriguing experience: many of the poems included here delineate the social issues of the time in a powerfully immediate – and of course, poetic – way.

For instance, Francis Watkins Harper’s account of a slave auction in “The Slave Mother” contains more stark emotive power than many other contemporary narratives:

His lightest word has been a tone
Of music round her heart
Their lives a streamlet blent in one–
Oh, Father! Must they part?

They tear him from her circling arms
Her last and fond embrace . . .

Lydia Huntley Sigourney – the first professional female poet in America – takes respectful notice of the diminishing Native American in her poems “Indian Names,” “Our Aborigines,” “Indian Girl’s Burial, ”and “Funeral of Mazeen.” “Funeral of Mazeen,” portrays the end of a royal lineage (that of the Mohegan Nation) and invites the reader to observe the profound sadness of a great nation in decline:

With the dust of kings in this noteless shade,
The last of a royal line is laid.
In whose stormy veins that current roll’d
Which curb’d the chief and the warrior bold;
Yet pride still burns in their humid clay,
Though the pomp of the sceptre hath pass’d away.

Most 19th century American female writers could not comfortably balance marriage and the writing life so some chose to simply avoid matrimony. Phoebe Cary, whose poems delineate matrimonial difficulties in a humorous and pointed way, was one of these single writers. In her poem, “Kate Ketchem” (get it?), she notes the foolishness of marrying for monetary reasons:

He married her for her father’s cash
She married him to cut a dash
But as for paying his debts, do you know
The father couldn’t see it so.

She wedded him to be rich and gay
But husband and children didn’t pay
He wasn’t the prize she hoped to draw
And wouldn’t live with his mother-in-law.

Cary, like many others presented in this collection, adds a powerful voice to the growing rumblings of the women’s movement. In her bitingly satirical dialogue poem “Was He Henpecked?” a husband responds to his wife’s desire for equality thus:

‘Now why,’ he said, ‘can’t such as you
Accept what we assign them?
You have your rights, ‘tis very true
But then, we should define them!’

‘I’d keep you in the chicken yard,
Safe, honored and respected;
From all that makes us rough and hard,
Your sex should be protected.’

“Major Voices” also gives a fresh perspective on the most currently celebrated 19th century American female poet: Emily Dickinson. Her poems are presented here in their raw, unpublished form; there are no titles and her original plethora of dashes are included, granting her poems a striking immediacy.

Providing an extensive and literary-slanted introduction to each writer and including a substantial selection of each one’s work, “Major Voices” presents a fascinating glimpse of 19th Century America through the eyes of its female poets.