摘要：The notion of "the Poetess" often seems to undermine the work of nineteenthcentury
American women poets, who may seek to "drop the feminine termination," as Elizabeth Oakes
Smith put it, but cannot do so, in spite of themselves. Yet if we are tempted toward a pejorative
reading of the Poetess—if, like Oakes Smith, we want to drop the –ess and get on with poets and
poetry—we may also undermine the cultural value of the figure for pretwentieth
century poets
and readers. For nineteenthcentury
American writers who inherited the generic category of the
Poetess from their British counterparts, the fact that it was an inherited category made it an
available commodity for reconfiguration and redistribution. Thus American women poets played
many variations on the Poetess theme established and explored by Charlotte Smith, Felicia
Hemans, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (to name just a few of the most influential English
women poets) and sent those variations back across the Atlantic and into the future. If in those
variations, American women poets have always troubled categories of genre, authorship, nation,
and gender, the recent resurgence of interest in women poets has caused a similar category
confusion for American literary history.
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