ABSTRACT
For a remarkable fifty-seven years (1854-1911), Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt successfully worked as a poet, publishing in many of the elite periodicals and presses of nineteenth-century America. In the eleven years that she spent in Ireland (1882-1893), Piatt gained an international reputation as well, often being favorably compared in the Irish and British press to the Brownings and Christina Rossetti. Built primarily upon the domestic experiences of marriage and motherhood and written with a distinctly genteel vocabulary, Piatt’s poetry was most often admired by nineteenth-century critics for its perceived fidelity to gender norms. For example, in a review of her earliest and only unsigned volume, A Woman’s Poems, William Dean Howells commended Piatt for having so aptly titled her work, finding her poetry praiseworthy for being so “thoroughly feminine in thought and expression, in subject and treatment” (“Recent Literature” 773). And George D. Prentice, the influential editor of the Louisville Journal, speculated that if Piatt remained “entirely true” to herself, she would become the “first poet of [her] sex in the United States” (qtd. in Willard and Livermore 569).
