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Conventionality and the Poetess

            Another key way in which Sentimentist poetics differs from the poetics of Romantic tradition is in the poetess's attitude towards the stylistic choices of conventionality and artificiality.  Mandell remarks that, while for a poet such as Wordsworth it was a point of honor to defamiliarize ordinary language, the poetess did not have the benefit of Wordsworth's education. For the poetess, as for writers of lower social class, highly conventional and even clichéd poetic diction could function as a value, a sign of education and culture.  Thus, not only is poetesses' poetry open to simple meters and conventional diction; it also evinces a conscious comfort with artificiality in general.

              Often, artificiality can be seen in the use of metaphor and conceit.  For example,  none of Lydia Sigourney's nature poems transforms natural objects in the service of the poetess' own concerns, unless they make it clear that that is what they are doing.  Such clarity is often attained through the use of those exaggerated figures which have given poetesses' poetry the epithet "artificial."  The consciousness of artificiality is developed to great complexity near the end of Sigoruney's "Autumn," where several of the poem's symbols explicitly explain their own significance to the poetess. Sigourney places the words spoken by the symbols in quotes:

"We are symbols, ye say, of the hastng doom
Of youth, and of health, and of beauty's bloom,
When Disease, with a hectic flush cloth glow,
And Time steal on with his tress of snow."

            Not only do the symbols describe their own meaning to the poetess; the phrase "ye say," which Sigourney has them address to her, indicates an additional level of selfconsciousness. The words emphasize that the symbolism occurs in the poetess' mind alone, and that the symbols do not seem to represent a truth outside the text of the poem. In other words, the poetess herself is aware that the meanings she sees in nature are constructed ones. This fact is not hidden in any way, but is one of the most apparent aspects of the poem.   As a result, this poem cannot be deconstructed in the same terms as a romantic Iyric; the reader in a sense has nothing at all to lose by seeing through the arbitrariness of the poem's imaginary meanings, since the arbitrariness is built into the poem's most accessible surface. This point is reinforced by the poet in the line, "Yet ye stillhave a voice to the musing heart,/Tree, Stream and Rose...". When the symbols proceed to give a moral at the end of the poem, it is clear that this metaphorical moral,

"The soul that admits in an evil hour
The breath of vice to its sacred bower
Will find its peace with its glory die,
Like the fading hues of an autumn sky."

is not any extra‑textual truth but only a further continuation of the poetess' very selfconscious musing. But, by putting the poem's meanings and morals into the voices of the natural objects rather than into her own voice, Sigourney has managed simultaneously to make it clear that all the meanings in the poem are obviously her own fictions and to avoid the subjective self that would be created if she were to draw these conclusions in a central human voice.

            Like the lack of a central subject-speaker, the choices of conventional diction, simple meters, and artificial conceits doomed the poetesses during the twentieth century to the invisibility of the supposed "sentimental."  Conventionality is, after all, the most instantly recognizable aspect of sentimentality and, in our age of aggressive individualism and the pursuit of novelty, the easiest to despise.  Sentimental conventionality involves transparent language, familiar figures, and an underlying conviction of artificiality that not only renders a lyric familiar and accessible, but also marks it as part of the larger literary and social community.   It is hard to recall now, in the age that has been so dominated by post-Romanticism, that originality was not always a key value in poetry.  In many eras, including the ancient world, the Renaissance, and the Englightenment, it was more important for a poet to capture a conventional idea with skill than to break new ground.  In order to read the work of the poetesses in its own terms, it is similarly necessary to set aside post-Romantic and post-New Critical assumptions that originality and innovation in language and concept are axiomatic poetic values.