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Sentimentality and the Poetess

            If the Romantic lyric aims to emphasize the integrity and emotional authenticity of the poet’s individual, passionate self, the Sentimentist lyric aims to position both poet and reader within a web of larger relationships, a world, a community.  Faith in the aesthetic value of a commonly shared, accessible understanding of the world forms the crucial distinction between the poetesses and what we think of as the postmodern sensibility—and, along with sexism,  it is probably the true basis of their denigration throughout most of the twentieth century.  The poetesses wrote of close relationships and commmunally shared feelings, blending their lives with those of the people around them in an intimacy that easily crossed the boundaries of individual selves.  That they wrote this way in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the lyric poetic self was by definition male, and when the level of self-assertion required of a lyric poet was almost impossible for most women even to envision, is a measure of their alienation from the most powerful hierarchies of poetic value.

            The poetesses embodied the sentimental world-view—based on diffuse lyric subjectivity, communal values, and a self-consciously artificial aesthetic—with great consistency. Their poems often attempted purposefully to reflect common values, as in the following passage from "The Aged" by Marguerite St. Leon Loud.

Lovely the aged!  when like shocks of corn,
Full ripe and ready for the reaper’s hand,
Which garners for the resurrection morn
The bodies of the just—in hope they stand.
And dead must be the heart, the bosom cold,
Which warms not with affection for the old.

            Many of the poetesses' poems center on relationships between women:  close friends, young nieces and daughters, babies, and mothers are frequent addressees.   Frances Sargent Osgood's 1850 volume Poems, for example, includes numerous poems addressed directly to intimate female friends, including "To Sarah"; "To Mrs. O";  "To Mary"; "To a Slandered Poetess";  "I Dearly Love a Changing Cheek";  "To Amelia Welby"; and many others.  Numerous other poems are meant to provide information and advice from one woman to another, including "Venus and the Modern Belle";  "To a Maiden in Doubt";  and "Golden Rules in Rhyme from a Matron to a Maiden."  And many others are addressed to or concern young girls:  "Fannys First Smile"; "Ellen Learning to Walk"; "Marion's Song in the Schoolroom"; "Little May Vincent"; and more.  This is the female-centered and domestic literary culture in which Emily Dickinson was participating when she included so many of her own poems in letters to friends and family members.

            The 'sentimentality" in the work of the poetesses had its origin in the eighteenth-century culture of "sensibility,"  the desire to return to feelings as the ground of truth, in reaction to the overreliance on Reason during the Enlightenment.  The poetry of Phillis Wheatley is a link between eighteenth-century sensibility and nineteenth-century sentimentality. When Wheatley writes, in her poem "To the University of Cambridge, in New England," "Ye blooming plants of human race divine, / an Ethiop tells you [sin is] your greatest foe," she sentimentalizes herself as an object, from the public position of an outsider like the reader. An African-American woman brought to this country as a slave when she was a child, Wheatley allegorizes herself and her race in such poems. Wheatley's numerous poems on the deaths of acquaintances and children also draw on conventional images of death in order to allegorize domestic scenes, in the same way that the nineteenth-century poetesess would later write poems explicitly in their capacity as mothers. Such a poetic focus on external images rather than on a centralized subjectivity is one of the key characteristics that distinguishes sentimental poetry from the poetry of sensibility.

            Sentimental writing presupposes a public community of readers who will feel what the writer has intended them to feel.   This presumption that the reader will react as planned is probably a major reason that contemporary readers, reared on the Romantic ethos of individuality, generally dislike sentimental art. Though evoking certain kinds of emotion is sentimentality's central aim, sentimentality accomplishes this aim not by ignoring persuasive, publically comprehensible rhetorical logic but by manipulating it.  The fear of being violated, of being known so intimately by a writer that one can be too obviously manipulated (not in the subtle way of high art, but in a way that is embarrassingly evident to any other person),  connects with fears of intimacy and dependence.   Nonetheless, the most salient aspects of sentimental poetry are well-suited to achieving the aim of establishing poet and reader within a shared communal world. 

            The most stereotypical sentimental subject of the poetess in America is the death of an infant.  Mark Twain's parody of poetess Emmeline Grangerford in Huckleberry Finn focusses on this aspect of the poetess.  In fact, the death of infants was an extremely common experience of nineteenth-century domestic life, and the poetesses' elegies served a necessary social function as well as an aesthetic one.   Sigourney's infuses her elegies with Christianity in order to give them the quality of a spiritual lesson.  Frances Osgood's "Ashes of Roses" is more personal in its emotion:

   I know her little heart is glad; some gentle angel guides
   My loved one on her joyous way, where'er in heaven she glides,
   Some angel far more wisely kind than I could ever be,
   With all my blind, wild, mother-love,—my Fanny, tends on thee!
   And every sweet want of thy heart her care benign fulfils,
   And every whisper'd wish for me, with lulling love she stills.

            Of course, it is not so much certain subjects as the way they are treated that causes contemporary readers the most difficulty appreciating the Sentimentist aesthetic.  Conventional language and the evocation of shared emotion can embarrass some readers by making a blatant appeal to a shared and common humanity.   Diffuse subjectivity embarrasses some readers by giving us the poet naked of the dignity conferred by lyric authority, and evident formal devices and stylized repetition further distance the speaker from the appearance of authentic subjectivity.   Yet we are used to ignoring conventionalized religious sentiments and other artifacts in the work of poets from previous centuries.  When read with an open mind, poems using Sentimentist strategies can create a strong emotional pull, a physical pleasure in words, and a sense of common humanity.