8 December 2022: Working on my entry on Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt and found myself laughing at this 1880 Scriber's review of her work:
"[Piatt] is nothing if not dramatic, and nothing if not subtle. Her method is a profound one, in that it works from within outward, and a faulty one, in that it implies more sympathy than she is likely to obtain, and more intelligence than is possessed by one reader in a hundred. Her conceptions are no doubt clear to her, but they are frequently obscure to others. Her situations may be striking from a psychological point of view, but they are not such as to commend themselves to the eyes of common men; the stage upon which her tragedies are played is of the soul, not of the senses. She not only demands an apprehension which is denied to the many, but she demands also that they forget the language which is natural to them, and learn the language which is natural to her..." (qtd. in Giordano 28-29)
We love a take-down that doesn't realize it's a compliment. Look, I am not a defender of incomprehensibility or inaccessibility for their own sake or as a definitive measure of value, merit, or skill, but to call her method "faulty" seems a fundamental distortion of what poetry can and should do/be (which is many things!).
Work Cited
Giordano, Matthew. “‘A Lesson from’ the Magazines: Sarah Piatt and the Postbellum Periodical Poet.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, vol. 16, no. 1, 2006, pp. 23–51. EBSCOhost.
