Early American Literature

Jennifer Putzi's Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry expertly engages the composition, publication, and circulation of women's printed poetry to produce a far-reaching theory and methodology of relational poetics as radical recovery. Moving with graceful nimbleness between this overarching framework and a precision born of copious archival work, Putzi offers a compelling narrative of women's engagement with print and its various networks and relations—a story unknown in part because studies of nineteenth-century women's authorship have primarily focused on prose and in part because of a scholarly emphasis on originality and individuality. Putzi's account of what she calls "unremarkable poetry"—that which aims at imitation rather than invention—produced by women poets in their particular gendered, classed, and [End Page 196] raced negotiations with authorship is a remarkable contribution to the study of American poetry.

Putzi joins a company of scholars such as Claudia Stokes, William Huntting Howell, Ezra Tawil, Alexandra Socarides, Kerry Larson, Eliza Richards, and Colin Wells who add to our understanding of nineteenth-century poetic culture as one that was deeply invested in imitation. She builds on the transformative work done by book history scholars, including Michael Winship, Meredith McGill, and Leon Jackson, as well as Virginia Jackson's theory that the lyric sublimates social mediations, to construct her concept of "relational poetics" (12). Relational poetics is first a theory that shaped antebellum women poets and second a scholarly methodology Putzi employs that arises from this archive. At its core it emphasizes "imitation, community, and collaboration … in poems themselves, in the avenues women poets take to gain access to print, and in the way their poems function within a variety of print cultural contexts" (1). Putzi turns from the figure of the nineteenth-century woman poet to the real labor of women poets within particular communities and then, taking her cues from the poems themselves, nimbly demonstrates how to read such poems as negotiations with various encumberments to authorship, print, and audience engagement.

Fair Copy begins with the ubiquitous poet, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, to establish the prevalence of relational poetics and then moves to four less read poets and poetic communities as test cases "to demonstrate the radical potential of this reframing of the critical lens" (17). Starting with Sigourney, the "American [Felicia] Hemans," allows Putzi to describe the ways that literary originalism and nationalism worked for and against Sigourney's consistent embrace of repetition, cyclicality, and audience engagement. One highlight of the chapter is how Putzi traces the misattribution of "Death of an Infant" to Sigourney in order to underscore the "continual and creative performance of poetic authorship" in each discrete appearance of the poem, as well as the sustaining pleasures her readers took in such questions (43). Establishing Sigourney's relational poetics against this backdrop of literary nationalism peels back the assumption of romantic conceptions of authorship as well as of the lyric poet, which then provides the momentum for the book to begin a multipronged foray into the composition, publication, and circulation of other women poets.

A poetic community well-known to scholars invested in working-class women, the mill girls of the Boston Manufacturing Company who published [End Page 197] the Lowell Offering between 1840 and 1845, comprises chapter 2. Putzi argues that previous assessments of these working-class poets as simply imitators aspiring to gentility and literariness does them a grave disservice, as it does not take into account that the poets were keenly aware of such criticisms already. Rather, the Offering poets wore their imitative practices on their sleeves and "claimed both the reading and the writing of poetry as a classless activity" (62). Offering poets transferred poetic practices of the domestic parlor to the space of the factory—clipping, pasting, and scrap-booking poetry onto the walls and machinery and internalizing it as their own; or, as Putzi writes, "literalizing the notion of the newspaper's 'poet's corner'" (72). Through...