ABSTRACT
Writers of sentimental poetry were responding to traditions that originated in eighteenth-century discourses of sensibility and characterized the early Romantic literature written by men such as Goethe. Foremost among recent scholars has been Paula Bernat Bennett, whose Poets in the Public Sphere argues that nineteenth-century women's poetry was part of public conversations about gender and social reform that led to the victories of first-wave feminism. In addition to sentimental lyric poetry, many women in the nineteenth century wrote poetry of protest; African American poets Sarah Louise Forten and her niece Charlotte Forten Grimke, Quaker writer Eliza Earle, and career poet Lydia Sigourney wrote in the 'high-sentimental' political mode. Nathaniel Hawthorne famously complained that 'America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women' and described their work as 'trash' written for a public he would be 'ashamed' to please.
