Palace-burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919) now ranks as the most important American woman poet of the nineteenth-century after Emily Dickinson. Published heavily in all the period's most prestigious journals, Piatt was widely celebrated by her peers as a gifted stylist in the genteel tradition. "Palace-Burner", however, also reveals Piatt's other side: ironic, experimental, and pushing the limits of Victorian language, the sentimental female persona, and what women's poetry could say. Paula Bernat Bennett's astutely edited selection of Piatt's mature work - much of it never before collected - explains why her "deviant poetics" caused her peers such discomfort and why they remain such a fertile ground for study today. Paula Bernat Bennett is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She is the author of "Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900", and other books.