Writing to Edmund Clarence Stedman sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s, poet Sarah Piatt expresses no small irritation at his or his “friends'” apparent rejection of her verse. While the details are unclear, her tone is not. Following a tensely polite salutation and words of customary modesty, she goes on to insist that whatever time Stedman had spent “discussing” her verse was ill spent: “I am sorry that you took the trouble to speak of me at all. I do not belong to the animals that go in herds. Whether my place be on the height or elsewhere, I choose to stand alone.” Implying that whatever venue he was considering her poems for, likely a magazine or anthology, was the domain of the “herds,” Piatt implicitly likens her contemporaries to literary sheep and positions herself in opposition to them. Sounding out from what has long been considered the female choir of submission, the defiance in Piatt's letter appeals to a deep desire I recognize in both myself and my students, one that is likely shared by many twenty-first-century readers of nineteenth-century women's poetry: the desire to hear women declare openly their deep frustration with the powers that restricted their range of lived experience and expression.

For all of this defiance, though, much of Piatt's life in print conformed to, cultivated, and maintained a version of female authorship often associated with “the herds” of male and female writers whose poetry filled the pages of newspapers and periodicals and whose books lined the shelves of nineteenth-century parlors.